Wine Shops

You walk into a wine store you've never been in before. A wall-to-wall sea of wine lies before you. Signs dangle overhead suggesting organization; tags festooning the shelves scream for your attention, promising guidance in the midst of the jockeying shopping carts.

Or maybe it's one of those library-like stores, as impressive in the polished bottles on mahogany shelves as it is in its deafening quietness.

Perhaps it's as slick as The Gap, all clean lines, brightly lit, with pulsing music and a bubbly staff selling a slim but very thought-out collection. Or maybe the only place to buy wine in the neighborhood is the local dour supermarket where the staff are all 15 years old.

Wine shops come in myriad styles. The key is to find the one that fits your style and vibe. Then you'll never dread shopping for wine again. Here are some tips for finding that place.

Location, Location, Location

Regardless how good the store, if it's hard to get to you're not going to get there very often. Find a store you can visit regularly so you can get to know it and the staff can get to know you.

Choice

If the closest store caters mostly to a paper-bag crowd, you may soon tire of the limited selection. Better to go a little farther for a store that offers more choices than you can get through in, say, a month.

Size Isn't Everything

Size doesn't necessarily indicate a great selection. While some super-sized wine shops have an incredibly wide wine selection, others have lots of the same mediocre stuff.

Advantages of Focus over Breadth

Some small stores are just small; others have a carefully edited selection honed to reflect the passions of its wine buyers. There are wine stores that focus mostly on Italian wines; on Burgundy; on Germany, local Australian, organic wines, old-fashioned wines—you name it, somebody loves it enough that they've started a collection. These places are a boon to the wine lover. Deep interest in certain wines or styles of wines often leads wine buyers to deep relationships with the makers of those wines, giving them entree to wines and prices other stores might not have, as well as knowledge they typically love to pass on to anyone interested. It also makes for a selection that bears the mark of someone's taste, and after a few trips, you can figure out whether you share that taste. If not, it's time to move on; if so, the chances of walking out with a bottle you like are high.

Focus isn't exclusive to small stores. At some large stores different people focus on different regions of the world, so that the large store feels almost like a collection of small stores, each section run by someone with a clear view of what they like and a deep knowledge of what's available.

Price

Few places go to the trouble of actually ripping you off, so don't worry about that. Think more about what you're getting for the price. Warehouse stores can get prices that no small store could afford, simply because they can buy in quantity. Price margins are usually so slim that few amenities—like knowledgeable staff—can be afforded. That's fine when you know what you're looking for.

However, if you like to be introduced to new, tasty things, an extra buck on a bottle of wine here and there pays itself back if the wine-store staff is kind and helpful. A store could be stocked to the gills with well-priced, fabulous selections, but if there's no one around to help you sift through the choices, how can you take advantage of them? You could end up paying for wines you don't really like, and miss out on the ones you would have loved.