Every December, I dig out a box from the loft of the barn that holds the gifts thirty years of producers sent me at Christmas. Pewter tastevins. A wooden case of Pol Roger glasses, two survivors. A linen-bound notebook from a Brunello producer outside Montalcino that I never had the heart to write in. Most of it I have never used. Some of it I use weekly. That is the thing about gifts for a wine drinker: the price tag is a terrible predictor of what gets reached for on a Tuesday night.
Susan and I get asked this question a lot around the holidays, usually by a daughter or a son-in-law who wants to do right by an oenophile parent. So here is what I would actually suggest, in the order I would suggest it, based on what has aged well in our house and what gets quietly donated to the church rummage sale.
Start with the wine itself
A bottle of something the giftee would not buy for themselves is almost always the right answer. Not the most expensive bottle on the shelf. The most thoughtful one. If they love Burgundy, find a village-level Chambolle or Volnay from a producer they have not tried. If they drink a lot of California Cabernet, hand them a Cornas or a Bandol and let them stretch. A small wine shop with a real buyer will help you here. Tell the buyer what your person already drinks and let them earn their keep.
Budget pour, under twenty dollars: an honest Cotes du Rhone Villages or a Loire Chenin Blanc will do more good than a flashy bottle from the wrong region.
A serious wine club, given the right way
Wine clubs used to be terrible. Cases of grocery-store juice with a glossy newsletter. The good ones now are quite a bit better. Firstleaf does data-driven personalization with a guarantee. Plonk leans organic and biodynamic. National Geographic's Travel the World by Wine Club ships internationally sourced bottles quarterly, which is a nice frame for somebody who likes to read about a region while they drink it.
Two practical notes. First, give a fixed-term subscription (three months, six months, a year) rather than an open-ended one that auto-renews. Your giftee will thank you when they are not still paying for it in March. Second, pay attention to your state's shipping laws. Some clubs cannot ship to Utah, Mississippi, or a handful of others, and a gift that cannot be delivered is no gift at all.
A preservation system that earns its counter space
This is the gift category that has actually changed since the last time anyone wrote one of these lists. Coravin makes a needle-and-argon system that pulls wine through the cork without removing it, leaving the bottle preserved for weeks, sometimes months. The Coravin Pivot, around a hundred dollars at the moment, replaces the cork with a stopper and uses argon to keep the wine fresh roughly four weeks. The Timeless line runs higher, around two hundred, and is the one to consider for someone who collects bottles they are not ready to commit to in one sitting.
I was skeptical when these first appeared. After using one on a Hermitage I wanted to revisit a month later, I came around. For a 60-something drinker who finishes maybe two glasses on a weeknight, this is the rare gadget that changes daily habits.
Better glasses, not more glasses
A pair of good glasses beats a set of eight mediocre ones. Riedel's Performance line is machine-made, durable, and dishwasher-friendly if you are careful. Zalto, Austrian, hand-blown, is lighter than anything you have held and disappears in the hand when you drink from it. Zalto runs around seventy a stem. Painful when one breaks. Worth it.
If you do not want to spend that, the Riedel Performance Cabernet/Merlot or the Spiegelau Authentis hold up well and pour about half the money. Any of these beat the heavy cut-crystal goblets you may have inherited from a parent.
A decanter that is easy to clean
I have decanted thousands of bottles, and I will tell you the truth: the prettiest decanter in the catalog is rarely the best decanter. Heavy cut crystal looks impressive and is miserable to wash. What you want is a simple, broad-bottomed vessel with a neck wide enough to fit a bottle brush. Riedel and Spiegelau both make plain glass decanters that are inexpensive and easy to live with. Save the cut-crystal showpiece for a 50th anniversary.
Books and maps that belong on a shelf
For a reader, Karen MacNeil's The Wine Bible is the standard one-volume reference and has been kept up to date through recent editions. Jancis Robinson and Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of Wine is the map-lover's book and is genuinely beautiful, edition after edition. Eric Asimov's How to Love Wine is the book to give a person who is intimidated by the subject.
Wall maps of Burgundy, the Mosel, or the Napa Valley from De Long are handsome and educational. I have one of the Burgundy map next to the stairs and I still stop and look at it.
Experiences over things
If your person can travel, a guided tasting at a region they admire is the gift that gets remembered. Limousine winery tours have become commonplace in Sonoma and Napa, and the small operators do them well, but you can do something similar in the Finger Lakes, the Willamette, Walla Walla, or the Texas Hill Country for considerably less money and a friendlier scale. Local matters here.
For an at-home version, a tasting class through a community college or a wine shop's monthly tasting series is a quiet pleasure for someone who is curious but not yet confident. Six sessions, twenty dollars apiece, is more education than any single bottle can buy.
What to skip
Aerator pourers that whoosh wine through a plastic gadget on the way out of the bottle: skip them. Most accomplish less than three minutes in the glass. Wine charms for stemware: harmless, but they tend to collect dust in a drawer. Novelty bottle stoppers shaped like grapes or dachshunds: a thoughtful person already has six. A vacuum-pump preservation system is fine but is largely outclassed by the argon systems above.
A small final thought
The best wine gift I ever received was from my eldest daughter, then twenty. She had handwritten on an index card the date and place where she had first seen me open a bottle of Bandol with our supper. That card lives in the book on Provencal wines on my shelf. The wine I drank that night is long gone. The card is not.
Spend within reason. Pay attention to what your person already drinks. Pour them something they will remember rather than something that impresses. That is most of the job.