Key Results

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• 15+ years of wine club running continuously, now seamlessly managed through Table22
• Nationwide reach, with dedicated members shipping as far as New Jersey
• Gateway to Italian wine education, converting casual drinkers into adventurous explorers of all 20 regions
• Operational overhaul, replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets and apps with a single streamlined platform

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Twenty regions, one mission

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Walk into Biondivino on any given afternoon and you'll find Emma behind the counter, pouring something from a producer she knows by first name - maybe a volcanic red from Mount Etna, maybe an esoteric white from the northern Adriatic that wasn't even supposed to make it to California. The shop, nestled in San Francisco, has spent two decades doing one thing exceptionally well: telling the full story of Italian wine.

That means native grapes, small producers, low-intervention winemaking, and an obsessive commitment to representing as many of Italy's 20 wine regions as possible. Emma describes the philosophy as favoring wines that are "exceptional in quality, exceptional in story, exceptional in representation of a place." The shelves rotate constantly, with wines made in old-fashioned communal stone troughs sitting alongside classically styled bottles from well-known appellations. Every bottle earns its spot not just by tasting good, but by having something worth saying.

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The Frankenstein problem

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Biondivino's wine club predates Emma's tenure - it's been running for at least 15 of the shop's 20 years. But longevity created its own kind of chaos. The club's infrastructure had evolved into what Emma calls "a Frankenstein of a system": various spreadsheets, apps, and billing platforms all stitched together over the years. Every seam was a place where something could go wrong, and things did go wrong. Human error was baked into the process.

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Emma knew the club needed to change but didn't know how to approach the problem. She's the first to admit she's not a systems person. "I'm not a spreadsheet girly," she says. Emma wanted to handle the curation, the relationships, and the tasting notes. The billing, logistics, and subscriber management, however, were dragging her down.

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A platform that fits the program

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When Table22 reached out, the timing was right. Emma was ready for a clean break from the cobbled-together backend, and Table22 offered exactly that: a single platform to handle billing, subscriber management, and the operational logistics that had been consuming energy better spent on wine.

The club itself didn't need reinventing. Members receive carefully curated Italian wines each month, spanning the full spectrum of what the shop represents - sparkling and still, funky and classical, light and full-bodied. Emma's selections reflect the same ethos that drives the shop: native grapes, low-intervention producers, and a relentless push to cover new ground across Italy's regions.

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Each shipment includes tasting cards with write-ups about the producer, notes on how the wine was made, tasting descriptors, and pairing suggestions. These aren't afterthoughts. When the cards were once temporarily unavailable, Emma heard about it immediately. Members want the full story, and that continued hunger for context is something that still surprises and moves her.

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"People really love those, and I'm very touched by that, honestly, because it's a nice reminder that people do want to learn and they're here for the full story."

- Emma, Biondivino

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Members also receive complimentary entries to weekly tastings, retail discounts, and no corkage fee for bottles opened in the shop - perks designed to keep the relationship alive between shipments.

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Constellations, not transactions

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For Emma, the wine club's most meaningful impact is how it sustains relationships with her guests. She describes her approach to guiding members' palates as building "a little constellation." Someone tries a wine they love in their club shipment, then comes in and asks for something similar. Emma steers them slightly sideways - maybe a different region, a different grape, a different style of winemaking. Over time, those reference points accumulate into genuine wine literacy, built on trust rather than textbooks.

The most gratifying moments come when members break through their own assumptions. A self-proclaimed red-wine-only drinker falls for an orange wine. Someone who found last month's selection "a little weird" realizes that weird isn't the same as bad. Emma takes risks (earthy, barnyard-forward bottles from the funkier end of the low-intervention spectrum), and nine times out of ten, members go along for the ride.

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The club has also given Emma leverage with her importers. On a trip to the northern Adriatic coast, she tasted a wine at lunch that the importer hadn't planned to bring into California. Because she could commit to a guaranteed order through her wine club, the importer brought it in. Members received something that otherwise wouldn't have existed on the West Coast at all - the kind of exclusive that no amount of shelf space can replicate.

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A community that ships across the country

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Biondivino's membership stretches well beyond the neighborhood - across San Francisco, throughout the Bay Area, and to a small but fiercely dedicated group of out-of-state subscribers. The farthest member lives in New Jersey, a former neighbor who moved back East and kept her subscription running despite the shipping costs.

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"She used to live around the corner. Had to move back to help with her parents and stayed in wine club. I was very touched by that."

- Emma, Biondivino

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That kind of loyalty speaks to something deeper than convenience. For members who've moved away, the monthly shipment is a tether to a community they still feel part of.

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The next vintage

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Emma continues chasing the goal of representing all 20 Italian wine regions on the shop's shelves and in the club, an ambition that ebbs and flows with availability and the realities of working with small-scale producers. She's also building out the shop's by-the-glass program and in-store drinking culture, creating more opportunities for members and neighbors to linger, taste, and discover.

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Her advice to anyone in the business considering a wine club is simple: come at it from a place of hospitality. The curation matters, but the connection matters more. "The community, your clients, your guests, your neighbors - that is the most impactful part about wine club," she says. When you lead with that, everything else follows.