Are you sipping some wine right now, starting to feel a bit like a aficionado, swirling that wine around in your glass, giving it deep sniffs, airy sips, dainty front-of-mouth gargles over your tongue? Thinking life is fine, if not grand, and wonder how life would be without lazy late afternoons, golden sunlight setting through yellow, green, red, and purple leaves, music from Amparanoia from Spain playing softly in the background, a loving partner, and/or good friends surrounding you? The wine and music is working its heavenly magic and you start think, “No way. Life without wine isn’t worth living”.

In a moment of intoxicated panic, you think, “I have to have wine delivered to me every three months. I must have a steady, reliable supply of wine. Wine that is unique, not found in stores. Wine that is DELIVERED TO MY DOOR!” And by chance while your significant other checks the telly for sports scores, you take a peek at your Twitter account and you see a Tweet from Hemispheres Wine Guild. You give it a read, and see your prayers have been answered. So without a second thought, you sign up. While you wait in anticipation for the first delivery, you have visions of having friends over, wine tasting parties, the joy you will bring your hosts when you join them for dinner parties and bring these unique bottles of wine as hostess gifts.

Then finally, after several months of drinking nothing but Peter Lehman’s 2007 Clancy’s Shiraz, your first shipment arrives! With the excitement of a child on Christmas morning, your rip open the box, toss aside the amazing packaging, and stand in awe at your first 12 bottles of wine.

Then you find the offering card.

Then you notice these things are to be cellared, in some cases, up to 15 years! Sure sure, you can drink the whites and the roses, but you want instant gratification! You are a red wine drinker. You want to pull out the cork of your brand new shiny bottle of Chateau Canet Les Evangiles 2007, and drink it now, and savour the hand harvested grapes that have been squeezed into a dark, firmly structured wine, exhibiting strong barrel notes, spicy and peppery flavours, instense fruit with a long tannic (almost Bordelaise) finish NOW NOW NOW.

As your visions of hosting wine parties vapourizes, the next thing you notice is your wine collection is turning out to be like the comedic sketch with the genius Lucille Ball when she and her friend Ethel get a job on the candy assembly line. The bottles of wine are stacking up, you realize you have no place to cellar them! Sure, sure we’re drinking the roses, we’re drinking the whites. We’re drinking a few of the reds, but they do need to mature.

People, we live in a two bedroom apartment, a warm two-bedroom apartment. We have no basement. We have no closet space. I have wine in boxes which is being used like furniture.

My friends, all said and done, even with these space and storage issues, I highly recommend Hemispheres Wine Guild. Its exciting, its reliable. The service outstanding and helpful. However, consider space. Consider that these are an investment meant to be saved for up to 15 YEARS! It’s almost like rescuing a kitten from the SPCA. It’s for life. Not for whimsical fancy.