Our Meetup website is at http://wine.meetup.com/139/
We have over 240 members, most inactive. About 4 new members join per week, most are new to the area and looking to make new friends.

Our Wine Enthusiast Meetup meets once monthly on a Monday evening at a local bar or restaurant with a sizable list of wines by the glass. Most members stick with a wine they love. Our meeting at the Gingerman featured wine flights, which was an excellent opportunity to try new wines. Each meeting attracts about a dozen members, with a mix of new and veteran members.

I keep an updated list of wine-related events on our meetup message boards, using information from a local bus tours company, New York wine trail websites, our local newspaper's food and drink blog and localwineevents.com

Last year, a few members gathered at a local wine shop for a wine tasting.

Our club has also held a BYOW wine dinner at Karavalli restaurant in Latham, NY. We asked each guest to bring a bottle of wine and $30 cash to cover corkage and food costs. The restaurant charged a $5 corkage fee and one of our members selected the dishes off of the menu. I offered a list of potential wines to bring based on information from the book The Renaissance Guide to Wine and Food Pairing by Tony DiDio.

We also had a wine dinner and two wine and food pairing events at members' homes.

The Santa Monica Meetup group holds informal meetups at members homes. The person hosting usually chooses a theme (ie California Cabs, Wines of S. America, etc)and the # of guests they are comfortable having. Members bring a small appetizer paired with their wine. Jessica says that meetups like this have become very popular & successful, with a "mad scramble to get into them" since most folks can only accomodate 15-40 guests.

Jeff says that the Raleigh-Durham area has several wine oriented meetups. One wine meetup only attends wineries & related trips, another does public tasting, another does in-home social tastings.

Rachel from the Durham, NC Meetup had the simplest advice - just have good events. She lets the restaurants do as much work for her as she can, pointing out that, "they've got the wine stewards, the space and if we can take advantage of them during slower times during the week, usually they're happy to give us a great deal."

Jill said that the Twin Cities Wine Enthusiast group started off very slow with only one person showing up to the first event and two to the second, but then it just took off.

One of the ways the group has grown is a lot of word of mouth from cross over members from other meet up groups.

Jill encourages people to bring people to events and then when she meets them she encourages them to sign up for the group. She talk to the repeat members at different events or email them and talk to them about different types of events they would like to see and things they would like to do.

Jill says her BYOB events are the most successful. She had one at her house where everyone brought a bottle, and she had a friend who was a wine educator come in and talk to the group and she asked everyone for a donation for appetizers and and put a bucket by the door.

This meetup also hosts dinner at a local restaurant. Jill works with local chefs and restaurant owners to help prepare the menu and sometimes the wine pairings along with picking a price point for the meal. She looks in the local paper or local magazines for new restaurant openings and will work something special with them to help them get business off the ground and the word out, keeping the dinners priced between $25-45.

Hertha from the Chicago Meetup has the following suggestions:
Develop relationships with wine retail stores in your area. They almost always can request free tastings from their distributors, which helps keep your event costs low. You should still charge something from members to attend (they appreciate it more if they pay $10 for it), but you can always spend that on food, hors d'ouevres, etc.
-- Market your group on LocalWineEvents.com, Craig's List, and any other local message/event boards or listings for your area. In some cases, that will be the local paper, but you can also post flyers in local grocery/gourmet stores, offices, restaurants, etc.
-- Make sure you card everyone who attends and doesn't look like they're 21. Meetup wine groups make it far too easy forunderage drinkers to join, sign up and attend events (esp. in member's homes or wine shops). I actually put something on my Meetup site about "Rules and Responsibilities" stating that I will card people if I think they're too young. Best to have something established in writing, just in case.
-- Other than that, I've found my most successful events are those that include stuff people want to learn about -- wine regions like California, South America, France, Italy, etc. Or varietals, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Rieslings. Or pairing food and wine (this goes over really big!), including choosing the right wine for picnics/barbeques/steak, fish, etc. Cooking with wine in the fall/harvest season is a sure bet. Or work with a local theatre group and have a wine tasting backstage after you all watch a performance, and members get to meet the actors. Restaurants have gotten to the point of reaching out to me to see if I'll bring my group to their restaurant, just because it gives them so much exposure and free marketing.
-- Some of my best-attended events are summer concerts in the park. If you have anything like that, or even a county/state fair, use it as a foundation for getting the group together with bring-in food and wine (be sure to make sure it's legal in the park, first!).
-- If there's a culinary school or technical college in your area, explore opportunities to work with them for a tasting. You could have members bring in a bottle of wine, then have teams of students prepare a dish they think would go well with the wine. Members and faculty could be the judges.

More Chicago meetup ideas from Hertha:
-- Art galleries are great venues for tastings, and having your group go to a gallery is not only interesting for members, it helps the gallery market itself.
-- If you're close to a larger city, you can work with some of the foreign trade associations to get a low-cost or even free wine tasting of wines from their countries. Australia, France, Spain and others all have wine trade promotion groups that do tastings for us at little to no cost, and their people even help you plan the event.

Ann from the North Texas Wine Meetup said her members enjoyed a 'cellar-sharing' where she brought several wines (whites & reds) that she had purchased over time & let everyone try what they liked. Ann would do it again but have each attendee bring a bottle from their 'cellar.' Ann also lets her members know about events she sees on localwineevents.com