Club Magnum Is All About Great Wine in Really, Really Big Bottles

Sharing a bottle of wine with friends is a great thing to do. Now imagine the wine was in a bigger bottle. You could either invite more friends, or drink more wine. It’s a win-win.

Club Magnum is a new wine subscription service from Carwyn Cellars centred around 1.5-litre bottles of wine, or magnums. For $59 (plus shipping) you can get a magnum of either red or white delivered to your door each month. For $109, you’ll get two.

The Carwyn team has been working with Australian producers – including Vinteloper, John Duval Wines, Brash Higgins and Michael Hall Wines in South Australia, Two Tonne Tasmania, and Dormilona in Western Australia – to source large-format bottles for a number of years now. Owner Ben Carwyn has a stash of French reds and aged whites ready to send out. He’s also been working with local producers to secure one-off bottlings and exclusives.

“We’re covering the whole spectrum of the wine industry,” Carwyn says. “We’ve got a traditional Heathcote shiraz that’ll be bottled for us in the next bottling run, we’ve got some really nice Eden Valley riesling, we’ll do some imports, we’ll do some minimal-intervention stuff. Just a bit of everything.”

The bottles are shipped in custom boxes designed to fit different shapes, from tall and slim pét-nat (a natural sparkling wine) to chunky bottles of bordeaux. Some wines are so rare that not all members will get the same one. But Carwyn sees this as a feature rather than a bug.

“We work on a scale where things are reasonably limited, so not everyone is getting exactly the same thing,” Carwyn explains. He’s encouraging members to share their deliveries on social media and even meet up to share the wine itself.

“People become friends and come here [The Back Room Bar at Carwyn Cellars] and drink every Friday night with people they’ve met here. So that community is fun and it’s something we quite enjoy,” he says.

Ben Duval, manager at Carwyn, says he sees a lot more interest in big bottles from consumers, but outside of specialist retailers, finding a good selection is difficult.

“Talking to customers, they’re super keen to drink magnums but they just can’t find them,” Duval says. “Walk into most retailers and they might have a few but generally they’re pretty expensive.”

The team is working to get more on Carwyn’s shelves, in their online store, and poured at The Back Room Bar, the bottle shop’s bar and beer garden.

And Carwyn and Duval aren’t planning to stop at 1.5 litres. Club members will have access to special offers of three-litre double magnums and nine-litre salmanazars. There’s even talk of stocking 27-litre primats.

And while receiving a 27-litre bottle of wine in the mail might not ever happen (we can only dream), Carwyn and Duval are planning a festival for next year to help celebrate their love of big bottles. Expect to see wine, beer and armagnac poured out of the largest bottles they can find.

The first 100 people to sign up to Club Magnum during August will receive a bonus magnum free of charge. And anyone who signs up during August and uses the code “BRASH” will be entered into a draw to win a 9-litre salmanazar of Brash Higgins wine.

carwyncellars.com.au/collections/club-magnum

This article first appeared on Broadsheet on August 2, 2019. Some products and prices may have changed since publication.