The enthusiastic, 26 year old proprietor of Le Vigne in Greenwich Village opened the door to his tiny wine store in late July. But that was the culmination of the lengthy license application process, which lasted almost a year. Before applying for the license, he had to have a lease on a space, which he signed last August. Despite having a backlog of 3,000 applications, Carlo said that the State Liquor Authority told him that the application process would take about six weeks and if there were no existing liquor store within 500 feet, the process would be smooth. Instead, the process dragged on and the space sat vacant, eating his rent. Since he had quit his job, he tried to find another but had difficulty: he couldn’t even get a job as a server at some BYOB restaurants in New Jersey where he had worked growing up. He relied on loans from friends and family.

In April, the SLA gave him a license so he had to set about designing the space. The 400 sq ft store housed a travel agency (remember those?) for much of the past three decades. Confronted with shag carpet and drab walls, Carlo knew that he had a design emergency. The only thing was that especially after the license application process, he didn’t have much of a budget: when he first contacted the design firm MADLAB, he said they all but hung up on him.

A couple of weeks later, however, they did get back to him with a proposal of furniture sourced entirely from the Salvation Army in Newark, NJ. Their plan included painting the furniture white, stacking the pieces in a jumble, and then stripping the walls and floors back to the brick and boards.

The shop stocks exclusively Italian wines and Carlo has laid out the shop by region on the furniture with the northern end of the peninsula near the door and Sicily at the rear. The 200 wines are from small producers and importers. He says the wines range in price from $12 to $184 for a mature Barolo.

Carlo worked in several restaurants growing up, but mostly BYOBs. He ate at Babbo when he was 21 and had such a great experience that he wrote David Lynch, then the wine director, a letter asking if he could work there hauling boxes. Much to Carlo’s surprise, he says that Lynch called him back. But seeing his admittedly featherweight wine resume, Lynch sent him to cut his teeth at Lupa first. He bounced around a few places including Italian Wine Merchants, Babbo and Inoteca North and briefly at sales for a wine importer.

At Le Vigne, he said that people in the neighborhood have a pretty good knowledge of wine; it’s not uncommon to have someone come in and request a vernaccia nera or something else from off the beaten path. (He attributes this knowledge to the high density of Italian restaurants in the neighborhood.) And people often want to experiment and pair wine with with non-traditional foods, such as watermelon soup, so he has to think creatively. He’ll give you a 10% discount for a case purchase and even store it in the back for you to drop in and collect a few bottles as necessary.

Although he still has debts, things are looking up now that the store is actually in business. “Every week gets better,” he says.

35 Greenwich Ave
(bet. 10th and Charles Streets)
(212) 255-0222
See it on the map of NYC wine shops

Last fall, Wine Library, the Springfield, New Jersey wine retailer, sent out an email offering for a wine that seemed to be the wine lover’s dream: a fantastic quality-to-price ratio. The wine on offer was the Sierra Carche 2005, a blend of Monastrell with Petit Verdot and Malbec from the off-the beaten path Spanish region of Jumilla. Jay Miller, a critic at the Wine Advocate, described it as “Inky purple, the wine offers an array of scents which jump from the glass… structured wine with gobs of flavor, terrific intensity… It will provide pleasure through 2025.” He awarded it 96 points. The suggested retail price was $40; Wine Library was offering it for $29.99. Robert Kenney, a New Jersey wine consumer, was so enthusiastic upon seeing the email that he ordered several six packs.

But Kenney’s euphoria turned sour as soon as he pulled a cork. He later wrote on the forums at erobertparker.com that “I have consumed 6 bottles already, praying that with each popped cork, a different genie will emerge…so far, no such luck…slapping 80 points on those bottles is generous.”

Kenney describes himself as an “unabashed fan of DrBigJ,” as Miller is known. But Kenney was so disappointed with the wine that he corresponded with Miller and FedExed Miller one of his bottles last fall for him to taste and “see if indeed it was indicative of the wine that he had tasted and scored highly.” Kenney wrote last week that “During a ten month period I had exchanged seven emails with DrBigJ, reminding/imploring him to taste the sent bottle…to no avail.”

Then a consumer in Pittsburgh, Bob Hudak, posted that he had found the wine for $38 at the PLCB, the state-run store in Pennsylvania. On July 5, Hudak wrote of his experience, “Considering that it was a Dr Big Jay 96 pointer in the WA, I figured I buy 6 bottles. I opened my first one this weekend. Big mistake. The wine had virtually no aroma at all. You couldn’t smell a darn thing. With time and air, some stinky aromas that were off-putting became noticeable.”

Kenney chimed in on the thread as did several other consumers with their negative experiences with the wine. (The wine’s scores on cellartracker.com were not all bad although several reviewers took the time to note flawed bottles and one gave it a 74 but the modal score was around 90.)

On July 14, Miller posted to the forum that he finally opened the bottle Kenney had sent him and declared it “undrinkable.” Miller contacted the importer of the wine, Mark Clinard of Well Oiled Wine Co., who replied, “We have had similar problems with this wine and had a meeting in March with the winery to find out what the problem is. There was clearly some substandard product shipped by the winery and we have had to take back a large chunk of this wine from the market because it was rejected by the trade. I apologize on behalf of the winery for this apparent bait and switch. Going forward we are searching for a different winery for this brand.” He posted his cell phone number and asked that those consumers with problems contact him.

Brandon Warnke, Vice President of Operations at Wine Library, posted that anyone who bought the wine through the store could return it to them for a full refund.

Jay Miller then wrote: “this is about the worst thing that can happen to a critic, to be tasted on a fraudulent wine, publish a note, and then have readers spend their good money on a fairly pricey wine only to find out that it’s plonk or worse. Its reminiscent of the furor over Las Rocas a few years ago that nearly killed that brand. It’s a bad situation all around.”

Bruce Leiserowitz, a consumer, then asked specific questions of Miller, who replied:

I’ll do my best, Bruce.
1. The wine was tasted at the usual venue where RMP and I taste with importers, The Oregon Grill in Hunt Vally, MD. Present was Mark Clinard and his partner in the Well-Oiled Wine Company, and Mark Noah, the sommelier who pours wine for Bob and myself. The wine was tasted from bottle; it was not presented as a barrel sample.
2. I can’t respond to this question except that Mark Clinard said that there were three different bottlings of this wine and that some of it was sound. A few people on the Board have given the wine excellent notes while others have had problems. The logical guess is that these discrepancies were due to the differrent bottlings. The wine that Robert Kenney sent me was not defective int he sense of brett, mercaptan, or any winemaking issue. It was just mediocre wine like you might expect in a cheap jug wine. As I said, pretty close to undrinkable.
3. I’ll take the blame for not tasting the wine right away. I just didn’t take it seriously since this was the only complaint that I knew about (until very recently when Bob Hudak and a few others reported their bad bottles).

For some history, go back and look what happened a number of years ago with Las Rocas. It obviously took a while for it to percolate up that there was some bad wine out there. Once it became clear, after being alerted by RMP who received some feedback about bad bottles, the importer Eric Solomon took responsibility. –MrBigJ

He also then added, “I meant fraudulent only in the sense that what I tasted in Robert Kenney’s bottle was a different wine than what I tasted with Mark Clinard at The Oregon Grill.”

This was the first vintage of Sierra Carche, which is owned by Guy Anderson in the United Kingdom. Guy Anderson Wines describes its business: “As one of the UK’s leading brand creators, …. [w]e are constantly researching and learning what people look for when choosing a wine…. We have a strong track record of producing innovative new wine brands…. [B]rands created by Guy Anderson Wines such as Fat Bastard, Mad Dogs & Englishmen and Gran Familia have found success in markets around the world.”

But there was still little known about the actual winery and vineyards producing the Sierra Carche. The importer’s page states that there were 20,000 bottles produced (the above label showed a number out of 16,000). There is scant elaboration on the vineyards.

In the absence of a reply from the Sierra Carche importer, Well Oiled Wine Co., Victor de la Serna offered some additional information. (De la Serna is a Madrid-based authority on Spanish wine and founder of elmundovino.es.) He writes:

I can give some information on this subject. Bodegas y Viñedos de Murcia is not a winery, but the commercial arm of the Casa de la Ermita group of wineries in southeastern Spain. This is a still quite recent (1999) group which began in Jumilla with Casa de la Ermita (DO Jumilla), was expanded with Casa de las Especias (DO Yecla) and Dominio de la Peseta (DO Alicante), three adjoining appellations sharing the same monastrell-dominated terroir, and there’s also, I believe, two more companies, Casa de la Ermita USA and Altos de la Ermita, the latter for upscale wines. The rapid expansion caused the raising of quite a few eyebrows in Spain. The group has been the subject of ‘for sale’ rumors for several years now – but business troubles are unfortunately not uncommon these days among Spanish wineries, so this is certainly not an isolated case.

There have been a couple of other similar cases of lot variation in the past few years involving inexpensive Spanish wines that were highly rated in the WA – always a risk, IMHO, with wines produced by large-scale wineries which can easily increase production of commercially successful brands. Sierra Carche seems to be a different case in that it’s a more expensive wine, but it does come from a very large winery.

Humberto Dorta, a wine consumer residing in Pennsylvania, corresponded with an official at the PLCB about the wine. Here is the reply from the official:

Thank you for contacting the PLCB and bringing this matter to my attention. Please be informed that the Bodegas Murcia Sierra Carche 2005 was not “dumped” on the PLCB as you have described. The importer, Well Oiled Wine presented the wine to my office in the Spring of 2008. As a long time business associate with a new import company. Mr. Mark Clinard of Well Oiled knows the purchasing power of the PLCB. He presented a volume purchase opportunity which we believed at the time would be a great fit for the Chairman Selection program.

As we do with all Premium Collection store proposed wine purchases, my buying team and I sampled the Sierra Carche 2005 which was rated 96pts from the Wine Advocate magazine and quoted with a price of $40.00. We found the wine to be outstanding, in spite of its youth it was showing deep black fruits and some pencil lead. The PLCB price was negotiated to $29.99 for a 700, six bottle, case purchase. The PLCB order arrived in August of 2008 on the first container of this wine to the United States. Only 525 cases of the wine had arrived which went to the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh markets. The Central PA order of 175 cases arrived later and was rejected due to it’s late arrival. The 525 cases sold through at $29.99 without any incidents of excessive customer returns.

Effective July 1, 2009 the wine was given a liquidation price of $18.99. There were approximately 150 bottles remaining at that time. As I stated the PLCB received wine from the first container of this wine to the US. I believe that subsequent shipments of the wine may have contained questionable juice. In the spring of this year, my office was offered the Bodegas Murcia Sierra Carche 2006 which we declined. I will personally pull a bottle from our remaining 2005 inventory to see if there is any cause for concern. Again thank you for passing the information along to me.

An email yesterday morning to importer Mark Clinard seeking clarification about the winery, the three lots, the production volume, and possibilities for customer refunds was not returned. Reached on his cell phone yesterday morning, he said he had no comment at this time.

Late yesterday someone posted to the fourms at wineberserkers.com using the handle BVM winemaker.

We produced a single tank of 180 hl for Sierra Carche 2005 and a sample was submitted to the Wine Advocate for tasting in November 2007. We bottled the full quantity over two days and labeled 20,000 bottles for Well Oiled Wine Co order (lots 8113 & 8114) and we reserved the remnant (3,600 bottles) into clean skin stock (lot 7033). Following the wine’s successful reception among customers and reviewers, we shipped the remnant lot 7033 to additional markets including 1050 bottles to the US. At the request of Mark Clinard at WOW Co following the complaint by the Wine Advocate, we re-tasted the wine and while we found no problems, we also sent samples for analysis at an independent laboratory. We will report the results as soon as they are available. In the meantime, in keeping with our policy on all wines delivered to any customer, BVM will honor any returns of Sierra Carche 2005.

The saga of Sierra Carche is a fascinating and still unfolding tale. One of the largest questions is what protections do consumers have? Have you ever been like Robert Kenney and bought a lot of wine based on a score without trying it? Do you think that wine stores should honor returns of this wine, as Wine Library is doing? (Not all states may allow returns and some may limit the length of time that a shop could return a wine to the distributor.) Although there appears to be nothing illegal with what has happened, and, if real, the “BVM winemaker” has offered returns of all wine so consumers like Robert Kenney can be made whole assuming the three tier system allows it.

My friend replied that it was actually $48 on their web site. The clerk said that was a web-only price and the price via phone and in-store was actually $57.99.

So he hung up and placed the order on the web for in-store pick-up.

It wasn’t the first time he had encountered such a price spread. He also tried to buy a Pax syrah in NYC and found it online for a good price. Swinging by after work, he found the in-store price was $20 higher. The clerk shrugged when he mentioned the online/in-store difference, my friend had to buy the wine then and there so he did and says he will never buy wine from that store again.

Suggesting a similar situation, another friend said that he had heard of a guy who went into a wine store looking for a bottle that he had seen online for $17. But upon bringing it to the register, the price was $20 and the clerk refused to give the “internet” price again. So the guy left, went home, ordered online for $17, and picked up the wine in-store. Wow, such admirable dedication to low prices, but that guy (and my friend) really needed an iPhone.

Why should customers have to resort to smartphones to find the best deals in some wine stores? In part, it’s a testimony to the price-leveling power of google and wine-specific search tools such as wine-searcher.com. (Full disclosure: I make a tiny amount of money–pennies, literally–as an affiliate of wine-searcher.com.) The site searches the online inventory of almost 10,000 wine stores worldwide. The default display is sorted by price, from lowest to highest. So when a store makes a commitment to maintaining an online inventory, they have an incentive to offer a low price to appear on the first page of results of a search for a given wine. In store customers might not be so price savvy.

And what of daily emails from wine retailers? I subscribe to some, but generally I find them a blunt instrument, blasting out offers on wines that I have no interest in. But I may give them a closer look since I learned that some retailers use these blasts to offer deals that are particularly attractive, indeed, too hot even to be listed online. Maybe I will take off some of those spam blocks I had set up…

Size of store: 320 sq feet, possibly the smallest in Manhattan [66 West Broadway; Tribeca]

Style of selections: well-edited! My version of the well-stocked wine closet: including daily essentials, quirky finds, and higher end treasures. Selection skews toward the Southern Hemisphere.
price average: 50% of stock is $20 or less

A cool bottle: “Syrocco” Syrah 2006 (Zenata, Morocco) – eye-rolling aside at the clever, rhyming name, the wine is a great value at $16.99. Alain Graillot of Northern Rhone fame is the man behind this project.

Date store opened: December 14th, 2007

Position on proposed reform to allow food stores to sell wine: There’s a Whole Foods around the corner, so the possibility that this will pass, combined with the current economic environment does worry me. Prior to opening my wine store, I ran the national business for several wine brands, so I understand that independent wine/liquor stores can co-exist with large, corporate grocery chains that also sell wine. However, given the current economic environment, this is probably not the best time to test the entrepreneurial spirit of the existing independent retail base to adjust to a drastically changed regulatory landscape. What I find interesting about this proposal is that the benefit (or possible lack of benefit) to the consumer barely enters into the discussion. The proposal was issued as a way to raise state funding, and as such, I think the financials need to be given real, detailed scrutiny.

I’ve seen top-line numbers from both sides, but the devil is in the details – and the only detail I have seen is the written testimony submitted by Whole Foods on 11/30/07 in preparation for last year’s budget (found herein pdf). I hope that unlike the scenario in that document, the State’s calculations take the negative consequences of existing store closures into account. I hope that “700 full-time-equivalent jobs” are enough to off-set the jobs lost due to those closings. And I hope that if passed, the actual franchise fee per location isn’t actually 10% – 0.2% of location sales for small stores ($500K or less per year) and only 0.05% – 0.06% of sales for the largest stores.

My suspicion, although I welcome hard numbers that firmly indicate otherwise, is that this plan will transfer wine sales from small, local retailers to large, corporate chain grocery stores at the time when these retailers have the least chance of success to successfully adjust their business models.

What you might do differently if passed : I already focus on smaller, boutique brands and offer a very high level of service. Ideally, the legislation would allow me to sell high-end beer and a small selection of gourmet goods – without turning myself into a full-on grocery If a grocery store gets to tag wine onto their existing business model, I should think I should have the opportunity to tag beer and cheese onto mine.

And if grocery stores are now allowed to sell wine in multiple locations under the same corporate license, shouldn’t wine stores be given the same ability to gain scale and compete? I’d love to see Frankly Wines logos in locations across the city….I bet I can pick up some old Starbucks leases on the cheap…if only I could find the funding.

That’s why he has proposed to allow food stores to sell wine, a subject we discussed the day the idea was floated. To recap the budgetary logic, he proposed to more than double the excise tax on wine and increase the points of sale beyond the 2,400 wine and liquor stores in the state and allow the 19,000 grocery stores to sell wine. The Governor’s office estimates that it will bring in an additional $150 million over three years, presumably from new store license fees and excise taxes rather than an increase in overall purchases. The deficit for next year alone is forecast to be $15 billion.

Shortly after I moved to New York State from Chicago four years ago, I was looking for a supermarket wine for a story and wondered where you found “supermarket wine” in New York. The answer is epitomized in this store I saw the other day, which we can call “Wines & Liqu” since that’s the only part of the neon sign that was illuminated. It’s these stores, uninspiring package stores, that don’t much invest in human capital and stock high-volume brands that will be most threatened by the impending change.

But alongside the Wines & Liqu stores are thriving boutiques that is probably the best concentration of wine stores in the universe. Check them out on my map of NYC wine stores if you want to explore some of the rich tapestry that blankets NYC. In the best of times, these stores would have little to fear from Costco, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Food Emporium, and Fresh Direct (oh wait, they already do) selling wine. But this is not the best of times; it is the worst of times economically so an erosion of even a small percentage of these stores’ business could bring them to the edge of a precipice.

So the challenge for these stores is to make this into an opportunity. One option is to take a page from the Chicago store playbook and add cheese, cured meats, and craft beers, sort of a gourmet deli with a strong wine focus. Another option is to continue to invest in staff training, since big box retailers all too often let the flaps of paper do the talking. In my view, the staff represents one of the great assets of small stores; forming a good relationship with someone on the staff can be worth it’s weight in, well, Cabernet. A final strategy that requires more capital (you remember back when banks made loans, don’t you?), would be taking a winning wine store and expand it to other parts of the city or state.

Many stores offer a discount to purchases of 12 bottles or more, in part because they get volume discounts when they buy from wholesalers. But food stores selling wine could siphon off the one or two bottle customer. Far be it for me to want to clog up my wallet any more, but perhaps a loyalty card scheme might come in handy and apply a discount retroactively after twelve bottles purchased. Or take a page from the air miles rewards program and offer customers tiered service through loyalty discounts or other perks based on total expenditure in the year. Price competition is likely to be more acute in the next chapter of NY wine retail, particularly if interstate wine shipping becomes a more widespread reality (but even this holds within it the opportunity to legally expand the market for boutique wines to states that don’t have such a varied selection).

Could interesting wines end up on supermarket shelves? Absolutely; I’ve certainly gotten interesting wines in supermarkets in Chicago and California. But supermarkets often operate with a regional buyer who sets up an approved list. And the list at even the best may not be extensive and small wineries, often the source of tasty bargains and interesting splurges, may not on the list since they don’t have sufficient volumes to supply a regional or national chain. As to drinking locally made wine, it’s probably a fair guess that since most wineries in New York don’t produce a lot of volume, they wouldn’t be winners under the reform either.

It will be fascinating to see what New York wine retail looks like in five years, assuming the proposed legislation passes. But to survey what the situation looks like now and hopefully generate some ideas, I’ve talked to several wine shop owners about their stores and their thoughts going forward. Check back for the first in our 2,400 part series, Better Know a Wine Shop.

Low prices! Party time! Love it! Oh, wait, that quote actually came from New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz and was referring to a “massive harvests” in Australia and New Zealand.

Here in the US, it may be a different story. Restaurants, many of which have seen a sharp decline in their business, seem to be doing a lot to attract diners, as Frank Bruni detailed on Wednesday in the Times. This includes cutting wine prices, which in many cases, certainly had plenty of room to come down. To the tape: “Wine discounts, waived corkage fees or wine lists showcasing less expensive bottles can be found in Midtown at Alto and the Modern, where bottles under $50 appear in the Bar Room as “wines for our times”; in TriBeCa at Capsouto Frères; and in Greenwich Village at Perry St., owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.”

A story in Wednesday’s LA Times suggests that New Zealand’s party time may even have arrived on the West Coast. Patrick Comiskey writes that there’s a “mini-boom for wine lovers” and describes “a buyer’s market for retailers and consumers alike.” But much of what the article describes sounds like smaller retailers stocking more wines at lower price points although some larger stores are using their heft to extract deals from wholesalers “whose warehouses are full of inventory accumulated in better days and who are striking deals to move it out.”

Here in New York, it doesn’t seem like “party time” has made it to stores. Sure, there are a few across-the-board sales in January and February, such as Moore Brothers 10% off everything and Crush Wine & Spirits 25% of whites one week and then reds. But these types of sales happen after the holiday binge every year, the same as case discounts at some retailers. Some stores seem to be offering more selective sales either through a store card or special clearance items. And there’s a stream of emails announcing one or two selections–sometimes more–of fine wine that have become available, perhaps from a distributor, perhaps from a collector. But to get the most for your wine dollar, it seems you have to be opportunistic and well informed and discounting is far from “rampant.”

What’s happening near you? Is it deal or no deal? And if you live outside the US, be sure to share your thoughts too.

The diminutive shop at 66 West Broadway has a selection that skews toward wines from the Southern Hemisphere and wines under $20. But perhaps the most distinctive feature of the shop is what might well be the world’s largest cork board made entirely from corks pulled from wine bottles.

Christy says that the covered portion of the wall, approximately six feet by eight feet, has about 15,000 corks affixed with wood glue. It took a total of 30 hours of labor to adhere them all. The original inspiration was to tastefully cover a fusebox but it grew to cover the whole wall.

The amount of corks that she actually pulled herself is a relatively small, she told me gesticulating at a small corner of the space. Instead the bulk of the corks came from purchases on eBay where she said there is a thriving market for corks.

Christy says that kids love the tactile nature of the wall and some have written their initials on the corks. Take that Facebook: people can write on Christy’s real wall.

Related: “I just saved you $40 at Pottery Barn”
13,500 bottles of wine are the wall
Map of the best wine shops in New York City

So I asked her whether she meant actually consuming wine or finding wine. She said both. So here’s what I said:

1. Spend a little extra on good stemware! You don’t have to break the bank since, undoubtedly, the glasses themselves will break at some point. But they can elevate modest wines and do fine wines the appropriate justice. Ravescroft has some good crystal stems starting at $10. And our house staple, as I’ve written before, is the Tritan Forte, which is “impact resistant” thanks to titanium infused in the lead-free crystal.

2. Find a good independent wine shop! You can read all you want about great sounding wines on blogs or in the paper but unless you can actually try the wines, your fun is severely limited. Work with an articulate member of the staff to find wines that you like.

You can read more about these suggestions–and more!–in my new book A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairing, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season. If Cara asked you for your top two general wine tips, what would you tell her?

Also, the first segment I did on Fox Business over the holidays has just unearthed from the great video vault somewhere (although the poor audio and video quality makes it look like I was in a witness relocation program). “Enjoy!”

Somewhat surprisingly for a suburb with $96,552 median household income, there didn’t appear to be an independent wine shop for miles. But Trader Joe’s sells wine in Illinois stores. And there was another choice: Wine Styles, a franchise wine store wedged in between a karate space and a day spa. I went to both to see what I could find.

Wine Styles rests a display bottle on a small shelf next to a series of plaster alcoves, which contain a case of the same wine. The limited wine selection is arrayed theoretically by flavor profile, ranging from crisp to rich for whites and fruity to bold for the reds. But I wanted some Champagne to toast our friend’s generosity so headed to the “Bubbly” area where there was an uninspiring collection of a few cavas. The clerk admitted that the selection was thin now, stating that they tend to ramp up bubblies toward the end of the year.

So I asked for a cru Beaujolais, which can be refreshing at any time of year but is a particularly good red for summer in my view. The clerk did not know whether this would be Fruity or Mellow, searched in both, then headed over to the Rich where he came up with a a new proposal: a Cotes du Rhone. Hmm. Not exactly what I was looking for. I excused myself and started poking around on the white side of the store.

I noticed that they stocked some wines from Kermit Lynch and homed in on the baby blue font of Champalou, a family-run winery in Vouvray (who makes a fine sparkling wine too). The dry wine is an excellent expression of the chenin blanc grape. Even though it was about 20% over the retail price elsewhere (search for Champalou), I bought the wine and headed back down the strip mall on foot, past the karate studio, Staples and an expanse of tarmac, still hot from a day in the late summer heat.

At Trader Joe’s, I loaded my cart with various things for our meal and headed to the wine aisle–yes, aisle, and not separate store as with their location 14th street in Manhattan (but that may change soon). The wine selection was more varied, with lots of Italian wines, and the prices seemed lower. But because there are many private label wines only available at Trader Joe’s, such as the iconic Charles Shaw aka “Two Buck Chuck,” it wasn’t always possible for me to compare prices to wines outside the store–or to have an idea of what the wine tasted like. And there was no staff member there to talk me through although I suppose I could have flagged someone down to hear what they had to say. Instead, I decided to plump for a bubbly I had tried before, bypassing the Pol Roger Champagne for the Roederer Estate sparkling wine from Anderson Valley.

I headed back to our friend’s, uncorked the wines, cooked the food, and enjoyed the metaphorical lemonade that we squeezed from the lemons the airline handed us. But I couldn’t help thinking that if those were my only two local wine shops that I’d favor Trader Joe’s in a pinch. I’d also try to seek out other stores either downtown or in other suburbs since Illinois residents are legally prohibited from ordering wine from out-of-state retailers.

And the price for this tasting? Free.

In this tough economy, even seeking solace in a wine glass can still cost a lot. But there is one place where you can still taste fine wine for free: New York wine stores. Granted, you’re standing up and the pours are sometimes barely enough to cover the bottom of the glass, but they are a great opportunity for broadening your tasting experience–as well as talking with some interesting people who are usually doing the pouring.

While there are many silly (separate entrances for separate licenses) and annoying (not being able to to sell cheese in a wine shop nor wine in a food shop) aspects of New York wine retail laws, the free tasting is a definite boon for consumers. Stores can’t charge for tasting since that would be profiting from the sale of liquor on-premises, which requires a different license. Other states have different rules about in-store pourings and they are not always free, but are often a good value. (Sadly, one place where free tastings may someday be illegal is the little-known wine country called France.)

And the downturn in the economy means that some shops are eagerly pouring wines (or, technically, having the distributor reps pour the wines) to attract foot traffic. So check out your local retailers and see what’s on the calendar. Here’s my map of my favorite NYC wine shops.

I was surfing the sites of a few online wine retailers today looking for some specific imported wines when I should have been working. Some of the sites generated other imported wines suggestions that sounded good but I hadn’t heard of the producers. Since you already list tons of information about the wine including the producer, region, vintage, possibly grape variety, and a critic’s opinion, how hard would it be to add a field to list the importer as well? I, for one, would be more likely to throw a bottle in my virtual shopping cart if I knew it was from one of my favorite importers. If I am in a shop I can look at the back label, which provides that info, but not online…

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Yet that is exactly what might be in store for Pennsylvania wine enthusiasts as the state has proposed to allow 100 “wine kiosks” around the state. To the tape:

The kiosks, a type of temperature-controlled vending machine capable of holding 500 bottles of wine, would be placed in grocery stores and other places [malls], according to request on the LCB’s Web site. They would offer about a dozen different types of wine.

Before you think this is where all the minors are going to go before the prom, each kiosk will have “fingerprints and biometric readings” for age verification. Yikes! Retinal scan for retsina.

Making wine more accessible is a good thing. I hope for all wine loving Pennsylvanians that the selection is great! Get a little Bollinger before heading to Borders? Malbec and a movie? I wonder if they will have stemware. Or perhaps TetraPak wine so the bottle doesn’t break while being dispensed.

Would you like to see them in your state?

Related: “Poll: should the US drinking age be lowered?”
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I visited the store when it first opened (and many times since then), but I recently went where I’d never been before: underground! Through a secret stairway behind the cognac display if you push the wall on the third shelf from the bottom…OK, there’s actually an open staircase with a conveyor belt on the side of it right behind the tasting bar.

The basement storage area is even larger than the store and extends under Lafayette Street! Lesley, my guide, said that the storage space at the previous location was even bigger, extending multiple levels below ground.

A room in the cellar is climate-controlled and they put the good stuff in there. Another walk-in, restaurant-style fridge has the sakés in it.

To power the cooling units as well as the store and portions of the building, Andrew Fisher, the owner, has purchased two Capstone microturbine generators. In short, they are powered by natural gas and produce both electricity and heat, allowing the store to live off the grid. Mayor Mike likes microturbines.

Despite the mayor’s enthusiasm, city bureaucracy has kept the microturbines unhooked for over year since they were installed. The gas meter has not been connected and the gas turned on. “Every time we ask ‘when,’ we get an answer of 2 weeks,” Fisher wrote me via email. Do turbines improve with age? Doubtful.

More photos after the jump.

Extends below Lafayette!

twin turbines, currently dormant

399 Lafayette at 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
Open 9AM – 9PM (Sunday noon – 5PM)
Subway: Line 6, Astor Place
212-674-7500
Be sure to check out their many free tastings.
See Astor on my map of NYC wine shops

First up, Moore Brothers. The chill-hounds at Mo Bro keep the entire store at 56 degrees. So how cold is their basement storage? I asked them if I could see it–and…wait for it…it’s 56 degrees too!

Bill, an employee of the store who happened to work in refrigeration for 16 years before getting into wine, explained that they have four cooling units split into several zones to cool the three stories.

Does it cost Mo’ money? Yes, to the tune of 50 cents a bottle, Bill said.

The basement storage area consisted of cardboard shipping boxes ready to go be filled. Shipping is hard for these folks given their cold fetish. Bill said they basically don’t ship during the summer.

They also had, as you would imagine, cases of wines imported more or less directly from boutique producers in France, Italy and Germany. They get all of their wine from one importer, Fleet Street, who is as fanatical about 56 degrees as they are.

Moore Brothers , 33 E. 20th Street (the block informally known as “wine alley”), 866-986-6673
NYC wine shop map

Are you in Paris today during the 24-hr public sector strike and wondering what to do? Why, set up a wine-drenched itinerary of local wine shops! Check out my brand new map of Paris wine stores–and wine bars that sell wines to go!

I give you the scoop on over 40 places including my faves, ranging from neighborhood places to super-luxury stops. If you’re a local looking for “natural” wines or a tourist looking for wines you can’t find at home, click through to start setting up your own itinerary for your next visit!

Paris wine shops, a map

Is one of yours not on the map? Drop me a line with the address and why you think it should be included.

Related: Bringing wine back with you from France
Paris/France wine round-up
All posts in French wine
The map room