53 National Wine Day Messages, Sorted by Who Is Holding the Glass

For friends

Friendship wine is not ceremony wine. It is the bottle with a history: the one from the trip, the one from the shop with the dog asleep under the counter, the one you both agreed tasted like the holiday and have bought every year since on no evidence. A Wine Day card to a friend lands when it names that history in one line and stops. The moment a friend card starts talking about bouquet and finish, it has wandered into the wrong register, and your friend, who knows exactly how much you know, will hear it.

• Happy Wine Day. The bottle is the one from the place with the dog asleep under the counter. You said it tasted like the holiday. It does.
• Twenty-two years of you choosing the wine at every dinner. Tonight somebody chooses for you. Happy Wine Day.
• For the woman who reads the back label first and the price second. Happy Wine Day, and the bottle is the one you pointed at in March.
• Wine Day, so this is official: your spare room is a wine cellar now. The guest bed lost. Happy May 25.
• You taught me that the second-cheapest bottle on the list is a trap set for people like me. This is not the second-cheapest bottle. Happy Wine Day.
• To the friend who keeps a corkscrew in the car, the glove box and, I now know, the tackle box. Happy Wine Day.
• Happy Wine Day to the only person I trust to order for the table. This bottle is my turn saying thanks.
• We have had this wine on a train, on a beach and once in a hospital car park, out of mugs. It travels well. So do you. Happy Wine Day.

For your partner

Partner lines fail in a specific way: they borrow the language of anniversary cards and pour it over a Tuesday in May. Keep them domestic. The shared table, the two glasses that have survived, the deal about who cooks and who opens. A partner does not need to be told the relationship improves with age. They need to be told the good bottle is coming out tonight, on a weeknight, for no reason the calendar would recognise as sufficient.

• Eleven years, and you still pour me the bigger half of the last glass. Wine Day is a poor return, but it is what the calendar offers.
• The bottle is from the valley we drove through with the map upside down. We never found the vineyard. We found this instead.
• Happy Wine Day. Same table, same two glasses, better wine than the year we drank it out of the tooth mugs.
• You open the bottle. I will cook the thing that takes forty minutes and ruins one pan. That has been the deal since 2016 and it holds.
• To the keeper of the good glasses and the steerer of every toast toward somebody else. Tonight the toast is yours.
• Wine Day, and the cellar book says we are saving this one for a special occasion. It is Tuesday. Open it.

For the one who actually knows wine

Every group has one: the person with a cellar book, a view on cork, and a memory for vintages that extends to other people's weddings. You cannot out-shop them and should not try. The honest card says so, then gets specific about the one thing you did notice: the bottle they pointed at, the vintage they said would be ready, the grape they defend at parties. Specificity is the whole gift here. A generic card to an expert reads as a card to nobody.

There is one reliable cheat, and it is legal: the expert's own wine shop. The staff there keep quiet notes on their regulars. What they bought, what they sent back, what they ask about twice. Say who the bottle is for and you will be handed something with a story attached, and the story is what goes in the card. A bottle chosen that way lets the card stay honest about how it was chosen: you did not find it, you went and asked, which is its own kind of compliment.

• I did not try to out-shop you. The man at your wine shop chose this and said the name of the vineyard the way people say a password. Happy Wine Day.
• For the cellar book, in your handwriting only: opened May 25, with the person who decants everything, including weeknights.
• You once identified a wine by the glass it was poured in. I am not competing with that. The card is the gift. The bottle is a prop.
• Happy Wine Day to the only person I know with an opinion on cork versus screwcap that has footnotes. The bottle has a cork. I checked.
• This is the vintage you said would be ready when your daughter turns eighteen. She is nineteen. I have taken the hint out of the rack for you.
• No tasting notes in this card. You will supply them at length, at the table, and we will pretend to write them down. Happy Wine Day.
• For the friend who ages wine and friends with the same patience. Both cellars are in good shape.

For the host, with the bottle you are bringing

A bottle carried to a dinner is two gifts wearing one coat: the wine, and the answer to the question every host asks silently, which is whether it is for tonight or for keeping. Say which, in the card, and you have done the host a real kindness. 'For the cellar' licences them to put it away without guilt. 'For tonight, with the lamb' licences them to open it without wondering if you meant it as a trophy. The same logic runs through our Thanksgiving messages: the note with the bottle is read twice, once at the door and once at the table.

And if you are arriving without a bottle, because the host has a cellar and views, the card has to do the carrying on its own. Do not apologise for the empty hands. Hosts with cellars are relieved by them. Promise a specific return instead: their table at yours, a named month, the dish you are still thinking about from last time. A promise with a date on it reads as a plan. A promise without one reads as manners.

• For the table, not the cellar: this is for tonight, with the lamb, at whatever temperature the room is. Thank you for having us.
• You cook, we bring the bottle, nobody photographs anything. The arrangement of ten summers. Happy Wine Day.
• A bottle for the cook is a rule in this house since the year of the dry chicken. This one is for after the washing up, feet up.
• Happy Wine Day to the host who seats the loud uncle at the far end and the good wine at mine.
• This bottle has one instruction: not for the sauce. The sauce gets the open one in the fridge door. Yours is for a glass.
• Thank you for the dinner where the power cut at eight and you served by candlelight and called it planned. The bottle is the sequel.

Bottle-tag lines: the ten-word card

Most Wine Day writing is not done in cards at all. It is done on a tag, in a shop doorway or a kitchen, in about ten words, with the bottle already in the bag. A tag cannot carry an essay, so it should carry the one thing a card would take three lines to say: what this bottle is for. Name the occasion it is being saved for, not the grape. 'Open when the deck chairs come out' tells the keeper more than any tasting note, because it books the bottle into a future evening they can picture.

• Open when the deck chairs come out. Happy Wine Day.
• For the first barbecue. Not the sausages. The cook.
• Save for the night the exam results land, either way.
• This one is for the porch, the long light, June.
• Open on the anniversary of the small kitchen, big dinners.
• For after the move, when the chairs are unpacked.
• Drink on the night the boat finally goes in.
• For the cook, after everyone has gone home. Wine Day.

For the people who pour it

May 25 is a working day for the people who make wine social: the tasting-room pourer, the wine-shop keeper, the sommelier who steered you to the cheaper bottle and was right. They spend Wine Day handing glasses to strangers who are celebrating Wine Day. A card to them is read at the end of a shift, so write the line you would want read at the end of yours: short, specific, and about the thing they did that nobody usually notices.

• To the woman at the tasting room who remembers what we bought in October and asked after the dog. Happy Wine Day.
• You have poured for a thousand tables and described this grape a thousand ways, kindly, every time. Today the glass is yours.
• Happy Wine Day to the cellar hand who actually knows which barrel is which, whatever the tour says.
• For the sommelier who steered us to the cheaper bottle and was right. We have dined out on that story for two years.
• To the wine-shop keeper who writes three words on the receipt, every time, and has never once been wrong. Happy Wine Day.
• You spend May 25 pouring for strangers celebrating May 25. This card is the glass at the end of your shift, in writing.

Funny ones, one pun per card

The wine pun is a bulk product. Every card site on earth sells the same crate of them, and one per card is plenty; two turns a joke into a theme, and a theme into a card the keeper reads once. Aim the humour at the calendar, at the two-days muddle, and at your own expertise, which is the one target in the room that never complains. The shelf of retired stock below is quoted so you can recognise it in the wild, not so you can send it.

You had me at Merlot. Sip happens. Grape expectations. Wine not. Happy Wine Day to my partner in wine.

Every one of those lines is on a card in a shop near you right now, which is the whole problem with sending them.

• I have celebrated Wine Day on February 18 three years running. This card is the correction. Growth.
• Happy Wine Day. The card cost more than the wine, which tells you exactly where my expertise ends.
• Wine improves with age. I improve with wine. Between us we have one reliable process. Happy May 25.
• I joined a wine club for the discounts. I stayed for the meetings, where nobody takes minutes and somebody always brings the good cheese.
• My tasting notes for this bottle: red, wet, gone by Friday. You are welcome. Happy Wine Day.
• Somewhere there is a photograph of us on the vineyard tour asking if the grapes were organic while eating a petrol-station sandwich. This bottle is the apology.
• Happy Wine Day. I have put the bottle in the fridge, which for a red is either wrong or a personality trait.

When the card goes without a bottle

Some of the people you most want to write to on May 25 do not drink. They are in recovery, pregnant, on medication, keeping a faith, or finished with it for reasons that are none of the card's business. The rule is plain: never send a bottle 'for the house' and hope it lands kindly, and never make the card explain itself. Send the card on its own, written to the person and the table, not to the glass. These lines assume the keeper reads every word, because keepers of no-bottle cards do.

The same rule quietly governs the office version. A wine-themed group card circulated around a whole team will eventually sit in front of somebody it fits badly: the colleague in recovery, the one whose religion is not a thing they discuss at work, the one who simply hates being wished a drink. If the team card is really for one wine-loving person, address it to them and let the others sign a line each, rather than branding the whole team's May after one person's hobby.

• No bottle with this card, on purpose and with respect. The day is about the people at the table. Glad you are at mine.
• Wine Day at ours means your glass gets the good sparkling water and the lemon, and nobody makes a speech about it. See you at seven.
• You are three years into the clear-headed life and I am not marking it with a bottle. Marking it with this instead: well done, again.
• The card is the whole gift this year, and it is not the smaller gift. The rack at yours is for guests. This note is not a guest.
• Happy Wine Day to the designated driver of twenty years of wine days. The road home has a lot to thank you for.

Turn it into a group card

Wine Day suits a group card better than most dates on the calendar, because the gift is usually a shared bottle anyway: the office signing for the cellar-keeper's birthday that happens to fall near May 25, the wine club marking the day with one card and one case, the table clubbing together for the host. A group ecard with multiple signers lets everyone write their own line, including the one person who actually knows which bottle to name. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, and our holiday card messages and virtual celebration ideas cover the group-card mechanics for the bigger dates.

The glass on the top shelf of my kitchen is the last of a set of six. The other five went one per summer, roughly, to concrete, to a door frame, to a dog of considerable size. Replacements have been suggested, by Gwen among others, and refused, because the survivor pours for everything now: wine on May 25, orange juice the rest of the year, and it has outlasted two kettles. It will presumably outlast the third.