Oenophiles, spill!

[babka]

impoverished writer here, so my home table habits run to under $10 a bottle, with special occasions leaping all the way up to $20...but I like to play!

Shopping: Bell's been good to me; Pearson's is in the middle of nowhere but sends snappy emails; Whole Foods sometimes thrills and sometimes spills, and TJ's cheap but never yet remarkable. Where do you go?

Drinking/learning: Thank you, Nectar--got to show off my new knowledge of a couple of lovely bottles at a friend's dinner last night. I know Citronelle will surpass all hopes, once I save up the bucks. Where do you go for interesting tastes?

Tasting: The suburbs--grapeseed and whatchamacallit in Virginia, but I don't pull my passport out much for district line crossing. Anyone inside the boundaries?

[JPW]

Shopping:

I head out to Total Wine for the huge selection. They do tastings every Saturday sometimes they have two tables going with 6-8 bottles per. I've picked up a couple bottles that I would not have otherwise tried (most recently a Temparanillo (sp?) and an absolutely luscious Amarone at about $17 each).

In DC, Calvert-Woodley is also huge and MacArthur beverage has a smaller, but very lovely selection.

Learning/Dining -

There used to be a couple embassies that did public "cuisine of.." dinners for reasonable prices. I haven't been to one in a while, but I went to one a couple of years ago at the Australian embassy.

Among mid-price DC restaurants (aka not cheap ethnic and not Citronelle), our own John W at Firefly always has an interesting wine list and a nice selection of by the glass pours.

[Mark Sommelier]

Check out FineWine.com . They have a great website and several stores in the suburbs. You can browse online or in person.

http://www.finewine.com

[mnebergall]

Don't overlook Wide World of Wines, on Wisc. Ave., across the street from and down from Pearson's. They have wine tastings on Saturdays.

[ozgirl06]

There is also Cleveland Park Liquor (Connecticut Ave near Yanyu). The guys at the store are very friendly and knowledgeable. The store usually offers tasting classes most months out of the year. You may want to call to make sure they are having classes in March.

[cjsadler]

Look in the Washington Post front page section every Monday. Most weeks there are great coupons for Total Wine. Last week they had ones for $2 off any bottle in the store $10 or more and one for $5 (!) off every Bordeaux $15 or more.

[painemilla]

My suggestion would be Rodman's on Wisc at Tentley town.

It's also a grocery store. They have great prices and a great selection from around the world, not sure on the tastings. They tend to have really go sales.

There is also this new place in Silver Spring off of Fenton called Adega. It's a unique place that mixes wine sales and a small cafe. They have daily tastings and also offer a Happy Hour with wines specials and appitizers...pretty cheap. The owner is very enthusiastic.

A couple of wine suggestions that are pretty inexpensive:

At Rodman there is a Chenin Blanc by Indaba in South Africa that goes for 5 or 6.99. It's been very successful at parties. In general, I would recommend exploring the South African wines. There is a great variety and at good prices

My husband is Chilean so we more often than not head for the Chilean wines ( but we are exploring South Africa more and more)which in general are a good price and very good. You can usualy get them from anywhere from 6.99 to 16.99 some obviously higher depending on if it's a reserve.

We usually go for:

Cousino Macul ( this is our top)

Santa Rita ( the Camenere is very good)

Errazuriz

Mars & Venus ( this is fairly new, inexpensive and very good)

El Toqui ( is also new, inexpensive and fairly good)

Concha y Toro ( is fine and cheap)

Undurraga

[bugsy]

call a few of your friends and invite them over providing they bring their favorite

wine in a catagory of your choce...make sure all are covered in a brown bag and tasted "blind"...what a way to learn!!! enjoy!

[liamdc]

I have recently become partial to Circle Wine & Liquor on Connecticut Ave, just south of Chevy Chase Circle. They have a much more thoughtful wine selection than Calvert Woodley. Their day-to-day prices are a couple of bucks higher, but they have frequent specials. Last week it was 20% off all Australian. This week it is 20% off all New Zealand and South Africa selections.

Schneider's on Capitol Hill, Mass Ave NE is also worth visiting.

[sara]

Try Best Cellars in Dupont Circle for plenty of wines around $10 and under.

[babka]

many thanks to all!

tho' there's a definite theme of haul your ass out to the suburbs going on here, of which I'm taking due note.

I signed up for finewine's newsletters, and, in scouting for the embassy tastings, realized that Washingtonian maintains a pretty good list of wine tasting/food events:

Washingtonian's Wine and Food Events

also, off-topic, I stumbled across Mr. W's Firefly for the first time on Sunday evening--it was about four blocks off of my imagination, but stunningly beautiful through the windows!

[maureen]

Don't ever buy wine in Montgomery County - county run monopoly with bad storage and pricing.

Macarthur's selection is about 500 times the size of Calvert-Woodley's - at least in the $20+ price point - but only a small fraction of what the store owns is on display.

Macarthurs is one of the great wine shops in the country if you are interested in French, Italian, or CA wine. Weaker on Australia, Austrian - getting getter with Germans. Don't know about Spain.

Calvert Woodley has probably the best selection of wines under $20 in the area. Arrowine (in Arlington) makes more of an effort than most to hold tastings. Rick's Gourmet in Alexandria is under new management and the new guy, Rob Stewart, has an outstanding palate - plus he's an experienced wine educator (he teaches a variety of classes throughout the year - if you are interested, call the store and ask him about them).

Tony at Cleveland Park does hold lots of tastings, is very nice, and makes a great effort to find interesting stuff kicking around with the distributors that he can offer at a fair price (remembering that this is a neighborhood store and doesn't try to compete with the big stores on loss-leader pricing) - great beer selection there too.

Pearsons used to have an outstanding fine wine selection - not so much anymore but they send out a great newsletter and it is a source for odd bargains.

Wide World of Wines is a bit of an insider's place with a huge business that is not apparent to the drop-in visitor. Nice tastings on Saturday afternoon in the downstairs room.

Rodman's has a great wine selection - for a drugstore. Good to have around in a pinch, especially on Sundays (although Fresh Fields, er, Whole Foods, serves that purpose now too).

Morris Miller - formerly a player, no longer.

I don't bother with Total Beverages.

As you can see, I spend waaaaaaay too much time in the DC area wine shops.

[iamthestretch]

While many of the best wine stores are out in the sticks (OK, the suburbs), one of the benefits of being in D.C. is that here we can also get the good stuff delivered to our door from all over the country by those nice men with the shorts and the brown vans. There's a world of choice out there on the Web, and I've found the upfront savings on offer generally compensate for the unfortunate fact that wine is heavy and expensive to ship. Since I'm originally from there, I'll enthusiastically second painemilla's endorsement of the fine juice coming out of South Africa these days. I'm a big fan of the guys at Southern Hemisphere Wine Center out in sunny Huntington Beach for some really good special deals and a lot of stuff from the bottom half of the world that you won't find anywhere else. Right now, I'm laying in the 2002 Fairview Goat Rotie from the Cape and the 2001 Ross Estates North Ridge Shiraz and 2002 Angus the Bull Cabernet from Down Under. If you want an easygoing, cheap everyday drinker (hey, I just described myself!), you'll probably enjoy the 2002 Excelsior Cabernet from South Africa, which Costco is giving away right now for $6 or so. I've also had a lot of fun, and spent a fair bit of money, with the good people at Wine Library, Zachys and Sherry-Lehmann. Even if you don't buy anything, you're bound to learn something just browsing. Like there's so much wine in the world, and so little cash...

[Al_Dente]

Don't ever buy wine in Montgomery County - county run monopoly with bad storage and pricing.

Don't buy ANY alcohol in Montgomery County. There should be a boycott. How much is the tax there? I saw a bottle of Beringer White Zin for $10! Not that I'd drink the stuff, but shouldn't that be less than $6?

[JPW]

I buy in the People's Republic only if I'm desperate through lack of proper planning.

To fill my booze needs, there's a Virginia ABC in the strip mall across from the Total Wine I like in McLean. Elsewise, I go down Connecticut across the border and go to one of the stores there.

The storage/environment in the SS booze store is horrific.

But I have to ask...

Al, What were you doing looking at White Zin? I have a whole new opinion of you now.

[Al_Dente]

But I have to ask...

Al, What were you doing looking at White Zin? I have a whole new opinion of you now.

Errr.... I swear, I was just scanning the bottles and the prices and that seemed to be one of the more egregious examples.

[hillvalley]

Sure you were

Betcha saw the Tooth Fairy buying a bottle while you were scoping out the prices

[sara]

The wine store on P st in G-town, around 20th?? has wine tastings for free every Saturday afternoon. The owner is very nice, knowledgeable, not at all pushy.

[Busboy]

Try Best Cellars in Dupont Circle for plenty of wines around $10 and under.

If you're near Best Cellars, walk the extra two blocks to the corner of Connecticut and Q and duck into the utterly unassuming liquor store on the corner, next to Kramer books. They have an excellent selection, most of the stuff is under -- well under -- $25, and the guy with the ponytail who runs the wine section really knows and cares about his stuff. IMHO, a much better place to get wine than BC and, since I work in the neighborhood, I've been to both stores many times.

I also like The Wine Specialists at New Hampshire and M, which has a good, though more pricy selection.

My office wine buddy and I both studiously avoid Tony at Cleveland Park Liquors. He lives in the CP and I hit that strip 3 or 4 times a week, as I live just across the Park in Mt Pleasant, so we've put some quality time in there, too. Inevitably, it seems, he's either trying to dump some odious "bargain" on you or trying to upsell you to something out of your price range. I know, there's a fine line between nice guy (with a different palate than mine) and used car salesman, but I have almost never liked a wine he has recommended.

Calvert Woodley is great if you watch for sales, but some of their salespeople are pretty damn snooty.

[Busboy]

The wine store on P st in G-town, around 20th?? has wine tastings for free every Saturday afternoon. The owner is very nice, knowledgeable, not at all pushy.

I think it's closer to 26th -- the one near the 7-11?

[DonRocks]

There's no shortcut to learning about wines: you have to drink them thoughtfully, and you have to read about them incessantly.

For practical advice and lots of consumer ratings, get the latest copy of Robert Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide which should be available at most large bookstores (he would probably chuckle if he knew I was recommending his book, but it really is the best thing out there for someone seeking practical wine-buying advice).

But what I always recommend to people wanting to learn about wine are Terry Theise's catalogs, published annually (one for Germany, one for Austria and one for Champagne). Forget about the wines themselves and just read Terry's hilarious, beautifully crafted writing that just gushes with passion. You can view the catalogs online (or order them hardcopy) at this website: http://www.skurnikwines.com/theise_catalogs.html

Cheers,

Rocks.

[Steve Klc]

And if you were to seek them out locally, where would you like to buy your Terry Theise wines, Don?

[maureen]

well, I'm not Don, but I've been buying german riesling since the 83 vintage was a current release so I may be qualified to answer this question. Although none of the local stores currently boast the german wine selection that was available at Pearson's when David Schildknecht (now writing the german wine reviews for Tanzer's "International Wine Cellar" and an importer, but not of German wine) was the wine buyer there, one can still find a good selection of german wine in this market. It is not limited to Terry's selections - in fact, one of the benefits of the recent re-discovery of German wine occassioned by the praise heaped on the 2001 vintage by, among others, Parker's "Wine Advocate" is that you can actually find Rudi Wiest's imports locally as well. The best selection of german wine in stock is at Macarthur's but Arrowine also does a brisk business in German wine and frequently holds informal tastings and more formal by-invitation-only German wine tastings at the store. Calvert Woodley used to be a player but is more limited in its German wine selection these days - still, it is worth browsing there as well. Rick's Gourmet in Alexandria is upping its German quotient since Rob Stewart, who has an excellent palate and an affinity for German riesling, became the manager.

Of course, there's also my cellar, which holds about 40-50 cases of German riesling!

[Joe H]

Maureen, I'm curious why you maintain that MacArthur's selection is so much more extensive than C/W? Perhaps on the shelves in the store but C/W has, I believe, far more in their basement than MacArthur has stored in back. Both also have stock elsewhere but I would not be surprised if C/W's overall sales volume is double or more that of MacArthur. Regardless, they are both superior stores and we are fortunate to have them as well as Schneider's and several others.

State Line in Elkton, Maryland is also a superb store. Their stock is probably comparable to anyone in the D. C. area. Philadelphia Magazine has annually awarded them the title of "best wine shop in the greater Philly area." They are known there as "smugglers' wines."

I have a half dozen trips a year to Germany on business each year, always bringing back at least six or more bottles of wine. When the Euro was weaker I would even bring back as much as a case or more on each trip! Still, it is frustrating that there is so little available here. I think most Americans have no idea just how good German wine-even German red wine-can be. For that matter most Americans have no idea what German food in the better restaurants is like.

[maureen]

Joe, in my experience, Calvert Woodley tends to have on the shelf a representative bottle of almost every thing they have for sale; Macarthur's displays about 25% of the different wines they have for sale. Very little is hidden downstairs at Calvert Woodley except for additional stock of what is on display. And I don't think Calvert Woodley has off-site storage (although it has considerable storage below the store); Macarthur's has a full (temperature controlled) warehouse in addition to the voluminous amounts of wine in the back and upstairs. There is simply no comparison between the two stores in terms of number of different $20+ wines owned by each. Frankly, I think the manager of Macarthur's wished that weren't so! And Macarthur's bought much more heavily in both the 2001 and 2002 German vintages than Calvert Woodley - believe me, I shop both and know what each has and has had to offer.

Now, you may be right as to whether C/W's total sales volume is greater - I haven't a clue - but C/W sells volumes of under $20 wine and that is simply not a market that Macarthur's has ever tried to compete in. But once you go beyond the "best-sellers" that Calvert Woodley advertises every week (in order to compete with Total Beverages), I don't think they exceed Macarthurs.

Nonetheless, I agree with you that both are excellent stores - they each have their strengths. And perhaps now that Allen Murphy is back at C/W, the German selection will get more emphasis, as he was the moving force behind that store's prior push on German wine and he did the same for Macarthur's when he was there (although Rick DeLauder is continuing with the German wine program Allen got going at Macarthurs).