Gifts for Wine Lovers Who Already Have Enough Wine

Most gifts for wine lovers are wine itself, which is a fine instinct but a limited one — there’s only so much shelf space, and most people who care about wine already have opinions about what they drink without being told. This guide takes a different approach: gifts that recognise the habit rather than feed it. Throws, cushions, tote bags and wall art carrying original cartoons about wine — the rituals, the snobbery, the slow creep from “a glass with dinner” to a dedicated rack — work as gifts because they’re aimed at the person, not the hobby’s supply chain.

CartoonStock has been cataloguing this kind of observational humour for over two decades, with more than 750,000 cartoons from over 1,000 artists, including contributors to The New Yorker and Private Eye. Wine — and the rituals, pretensions and small domestic negotiations around it — has been a reliable subject for that long because it’s a habit most people recognise in someone close to them, whether that’s a parent, a colleague, or themselves on a Tuesday.
What makes a cartoon gift work here is specificity. A generic “wine o’clock” slogan on a mug says nothing about the person receiving it. A cartoon that captures the particular absurdity of decanting a £9 bottle, or owning more glassware than crockery, says rather more — and printed onto something they’ll actually use, it tends to outlast the joke that prompted it. These make sense for birthdays, Christmas, retirement, a thank-you to a host, or Secret Santa, but they work equally well with no occasion attached.