Sacred rules of friendship:

Remembering birthdays.

Relaying a broccoli-in-teeth situation with extreme discretion.

Oh, and showing up to dinner parties with delicious wines no one’s ever heard of.

At the door, it’s GrapeSeed Wine Fund: a new service that’s kind of like a wine club meets Kickstarter, accepting members now.

Essentially, it’s a subscription wine club wherein your money funds top winemakers’ creative projects, and in exchange they’ll ship various exclusive wines straight to your face, and eventually send you on wine excursions.

First, you’ll sign up and pay the monthly fee. Excellent. You’ve now got access to the latest wine options—the head winemaker hails from Jackson Family Wines, and so far he’s brought a Beringer vet, the Alpha Omega winemaker and three others into the mix.

Maybe order a Sonoma Coast chardonnay or a North Coast All Stars bottle of pinot noir. Maybe wait a month or two, and then splurge on five bottles of the Elementary cabernet sauvignon. You can kind of do what you want.

And when you do... what you want... you’ll start earning, say, a spot on a patio at an Alpha Omega tasting. Or an evening staring off into the serene landscape at a Lichen Estate private cottage.

Thinking something like “Thanks, wine.”