Shopping for wine online is nothing new. There are ample existing subscription services that deliver selected bottles to your doorstep—and plenty that specialize in natural wine, too. But more often than not, when you sign up for a wine club, you receive the same selection of wines as every other customer each month. Enter The Waves: a new online natural wine service that promises a more personalized, highly curated experience. “People are always giving the same packages in other subscriptions because when you’re working with conventional wine, you can scale quantities pretty dramatically,” explains Billy Smith, the former wine director of Brooklyn’s pioneering natural wine bar The Four Horsemen and now the chief wine officer at The Waves.
For The Waves, he and the celebrated winemaker and sommelier Rajat Parr instead curate a global library of wines made by producers they know and respect, all of whom make wines with organically farmed grapes and no synthetic chemical additives. With a subscription, you can browse bottles on The Waves’ website, read about them, and ultimately, choose which wines you want to drop into your box. (You can also have The Waves make a selection for you if you prefer.)
Beyond its unique approach to curating its offering, The Waves also stands apart from other e-commerce wine platforms by providing a shopping experience that’s simultaneously educational and fun. On their website, wines are organized not by grape varietals or producers, but by lifestyle—empowering subscribers to find wines that are suited to their needs instead of based on what they already know. “The intent is to make wine super easy and serviceable by relating it back to ‘Are you looking for the perfect wine to host a dinner party? Are you looking for the perfect poolside wine? Are you looking for a wine you just want to curl up on the couch with?’” says Andy Comer, The Waves’ co-founder and president.
You can search by filters such as “Show Up in Style” or “Unplug & Chill” and each wine’s profile contains “vibe” indicators, like “dance-floor drinker,” “foolproof with food,” and “street cred.” Furthermore, the actual wine descriptions are “a little irreverent and a little cheeky,” says Smith, meant to be an antidote to the boring and oftentimes pretentious traditional wine speak around food pairings and tasting notes. For example, they describe one of their go-to wines for this summer, a rosé made by Milan Nestarec in the Czech Republic, as “Capri Sun for the big kids’ table” and a splurge-y bottle of French Trousseau from winemaker Stephanie Trousseau as “a ballerina, a glowing paper lantern, a field of violets.”
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