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“A great wine education class. I was amazed by the instructor's wealth of knowledge, the great wines to taste and talk about, and the small, intimate class size. A fun way to learn a lot about wine.”

—Will, Ritchie Creek Vineyards

Unique Gift Ideas for Wine Lovers

Learning about Fine Wine is a lifelong pleasure. The joy comes from being on the journey; not from reaching a destination. You can give this lifelong journey as a gift of wine education.

Give a Gift Certificate from Bruce Cass Wine Lab

Gift recipients get a lot out of the wine learning experience, but they also enjoy quite a bit of social interaction. Participants in our classes sit around rectangular tables specifically to encourage chat about the wines and about each student’s personal experiences. That’s a big part of wine culture. If it were just about the information, that could be delivered in a magazine or over the Internet. But the total wine experience can’t be delivered that way.

Fine wine is a three-legged stool: one part romantic information; one part smell and taste; and one-part conversational intercourse. Everyone has to get the experience in person.

That is the unique feature our classes deliver so effectively.

You can be confident that classes with the BRUCE CASS WINE LAB will always be an objective education. We are not promoting certain wines, nor particular regions. We are merely explaining what makes one wine different from another. Then students arrive at their own conclusions about quality, value, and enjoyment based on side-by-side glasses of wine. The instructor is fun and entertaining, but the actual teaching is accomplished through an adroit selection of wines for illustrative comparison.

We teach classes continuously throughout the year. Your Gift recipient can choose the time and location most convenient for them. Gift Certificates are good for the entire calendar year following purchase (i.e. all of 2009). AND our policy is that if a student needs to miss a session within a course, they can make it up any time over a year. Timing is not a problem when you give a Bruce Cass Wine Lab Gift Certificate.

We can mail you the certificate ~ to present as a Christmas present ~ or we can send it to you electronically, and you can print it out yourself [a color printer will make it look a bit more impressive].

Flexible Gift Certificate Amounts

1. Choose any dollar amount: We can issue Gift Certificates for any dollar amount you wish. If you give us an email address (and/or phone number) for the recipient, we’ll contact them in 2009 with a list of class offerings, and invite them to call us for a friendly discussion on how and when (and where) they might prefer to apply the Gift.
2. Or choose a class category:
   • $ 229 is the price (per person) of our very popular 3-session Fundamentals of Taste & Smell course. We teach this class seven to ten times each year in various locations around the Bay Area.
   • $ 295 is the price per person for half of our 8-session Essentials of Great Wine course. The full 8-sessions cost $595, but students can choose to take just the first half, or just the second half. Then they can return to complete the course at another time. In Essentials of Great Wine all the sessions are modular, each is understandable completely on its own.
     

• $100 Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $200 Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $229 Fundamentals Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $300 Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $50 Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $500 Gift Certificate — add to cart
• $595 Essentials Gift Certificate — add to cart

Budget Gifts for Wine Lovers

SPECIAL BOOK AND ACCESSORY RECOMMENDATIONS

If a lower dollar figure is what you seek for gift giving, we are currently offering a set of insider recommendations on great wine books and on useful wine accessories as an inducement to leave us your contact information. And as an inducement to refer your wine-interested friends to us ~ even in other parts of the country {we’re doing Wine Education Weekender Classes with Kimpton hotels now]. These books and accessories can be purchased online for a steal. We won’t own an inventory for resale; these are third-party, objective recommendations.

In this same vein, we have archived two pages (8 wines) of Bruce’s personal recommendations for spectacular wines that could have been purchased at bargain prices online earlier this Fall. It is not something (promoting specific wines) that we normally do, but we really are eager to capture contact information on visitors to our website so we can inform then about class offerings in the future.

How to get Bruce's personal recommendations for gifts and wines?

It's easy. Look for the graphic at the top right of most pages of this site to leave us your email address, then download the lists of wine and gift suggestions. Many of them may still be available at the links we’ve provided.