Today we snagged the 2026 Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar! For the third year in a row, we’ll be tearing apart that bright blue cardboard and digging into a selection of international wines from the warehouse giant.
Read on to find out what’s new in the 2026 calendar, which wines are returning, and how to keep up with our breathless coverage of this annual assortment. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
What is the Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar?
For the uninitiated, the Wine Advent-ure Calendar is a box of 24 half-bottles of wine that comes out every year. The wine is hidden behind numbered cardboard flaps, and you’re supposed to reveal one bottle per day during the month of December. (Though impatient winos like me start much, much earlier.)
The box is offered at select Costco stores and is priced at $99.99 in most markets. (I don’t have any other distribution info, sorry! I recommend contacting Costco directly with those questions.) I picked up my kit in Plano, Texas on August 30, 2026 and paid $108.24 including tax.
What wines are included?
The assortment emphasizes variety. The box changes each year but always includes a mix of reds and whites, sweet and dry wines–and often flavored, rosé, and sparkling wines, too.
You’d have to have a very agreeable palate to like every selection in the box. But at 375 mL of wine per bottle, it’s not a huge commitment to try something new. At my after-tax price, the bottles average out to $4.51 each, or around $2 per glass–also not a huge commitment.
Wines typically come from a dozen or more countries and regions all over the world. Keep scrolling for a complete list of what’s included in the 2026 Advent-ure Calendar.
Are the wines any good?
We’ll reserve our judgment on the 2026 box until we’ve tasted all of this year’s wines. But our past experiences have shown that the contents are mixed in quality. A few are dump-able, most are just fine, and there are a couple each year that we’d be happy to drink in a larger format. The calendar consists of bulk wines that are purchased and bottled for Costco by the negociant/importer Flying Blue, and the majority are acceptable to good.
In short, these aren’t wines that will change your life–and depending on where you live, you might even be able to build a better mixed case of supermarket wines for around $100.
But the calendar is a lot of fun. That’s why we keep buying it year after year.
What’s returning, and what’s new?
The 2026 calendar features new vintages of several wines that previously appeared in last year’s calendar. They include two bottles that we rated quite highly last year (Sheep Station Sauvignon Blanc and Maison du Lac Sauvignon Blanc), proving that Sauvy B is really hard to screw up. The Les Champs d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon and Ciel Bleu French sparkling wine are also back for their encore performances.
Novel bottles are numerous and include a Soju-style wine beverage, a lime-flavored wine cocktail, a pistachio/chocolate-infused red wine, and a Glühwein (German-style spiced wine).
Global wine explorers may be intrigued by the presence of a rare Spanish white grape, Beba de los Santos, and a Vranec-Plavac red blend from North Macedonia.
Confusingly, the Costco calendar frequently reuses wine names and artwork elements. For example, “Meadow Moon” was Riesling last year–this year, it’s a Zinfandel. The flower-festooned “Aralena” label once belonged to a Pinot Grigio, but has since been reborn as Garnacha.
List of 2026 Wines
Final spoiler alert! Here are the contents of this year’s calendar, in sequential order:
Tranquille Red Blend (2024) – Spain
Sheep Station Sauvignon Blanc (2025) – Marlborough, New Zealand
Seaworth Pinot Noir (2024) – Chile
El Campeón Beba de los Santos (2025) – Spain
Meadow Moon Zinfandel (2024) – California, United States
Aralena Garnacha (2025) – Spain
Right Hook Ripasso (2024) – Puglia IGT, Italy
Racer 67 Pistachio-Chocolate Grape Wine with Natural Flavors (NV) – France
Who’s Who Riesling (2025) – Landwein Rhein, Germany
Les Champs d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon (2025) – Pays d’Oc IGP, France
Maison du Lac Sauvignon Blanc (2025) – France
North Thirty-Eight Chardonnay (2025) – California, United States
Rabbit Run Muscat (2025) – Pays d’Oc IGP, France
L’Artiste Citrus Lime Aromatised Wine-Based Cocktail (NV) – France
Solo Reflections Cabernet Sauvignon-Carménère (2025) – D.O. Valle Central, Chile
Blue Seirína White Blend (2025) – Greece
Once Upon a Time Chardonnay (2025) – South Eastern Australia
Queen’s Gambit Vranec-Plavac (2025) – North Macedonia
Struggling Deep Roots Blaufränkisch (2023) – Dunántúl PGI, Hungary
12 Generations Glühwein Red Grape Wine with Natural Flavors (NV) – France
Blu Blu Peach Soju-Style Product (NV) – United States
Brillo Solar Red Blend (2025) – Portugal
Secrets Revealed Grüner Veltliner (2025) – Dunántúl PGI, Hungary
Ciel Bleu Brut Sparkling Wine (NV) – France
My 2026 review plan
Here’s how I approach reviewing the advent calendar: I taste the wines in order, non-blind. I open one or two at a time, usually before dinner. Sometimes I taste them with my wife, Sarah, if she’s game to try a random Costco wine. I alternate drinking these wines with other types of tasting work for the blog.
I have a fairly detailed wine-scoring philosophy and a numerical scale that I usually employ when reviewing wines. But for the annual Costco calendar game, I chuck that system out the window, resorting to a gut-level verdict that I express with a letter grade of “A” through “F.” So, these cheapie white-label wines exist in a separate scoring universe from most of my bottle reviews.
I confess that I got really obsessed with the Costco advent calendar project last year. I reviewed and photographed every wine individually, researched many of them, devised food pairings, and ended up churning out a total of 13,314 words of articles about Costco mini wines.
This year I probably won’t be as detailed, for a number of reasons.
I started working in the wine industry this spring. As a result, lots more commercially relevant and enduring bottles are coming my way. I also started the WSET Level 4 Diploma in Wines, so study is taking up a lot of my free writing time. (I take the first exam in early December, around the time that good boys and girls will be busting into the first of their advent calendar wines.)
But I have not abandoned you, Costco Wine Advent-urers! I still plan to open these 24 bottles, taste them attentively, and report back. They may be grouped in flights of four or six wines, instead of each wine getting its own post.
As we tackle the 2026 box, each wine will get a tasting note and a casual letter grade, like last year. I’ll likely also post a photo and review summary on Vivino.
If you pick up this year’s calendar, please feel free to comment and taste along with me. Cheers, and happy (early) holidays!
Disclosure: I was not compensated or provided any free products for this article. Opinions expressed on The Wine Fairy blog are entirely my own.
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