bottles. Bigger stores often use the preprinted ones from their wine distributors. Stacked on the floor near the entry is the inventory you hope to move. Either it has the best markup (wineshops make more on the cheap stuff) or it is the junk you were forced into buying to get something of higher quality that you wanted.
In Europe, a hands-off approach still dominates. Stores typically display one bottle of each selection, often behind closed cabinet doors. You must ask for help if you actually want to hold a bottle. New York’s Sherry-Lehmann recently renovated its flagship, using a similar model. Display bottles are under lock and key, and stock is sent up from the basement by notifying a clerk. Buying wine feels luxurious—and intimidating. Neither of these directions was particularly compelling to us.
My brother Nicolas was also one of those naysayers. “Who’s really going to buy wine down in that godforsaken neighborhood?” my skeptical sibling asked me. “Malt liquor, maybe,” he offered, “but
wine
?”
Nicky’s doubts juiced my enthusiasm. Despite being whip-smart (he’s an architect and successful real estate developer), my brother is staggeringly trend-deaf. When Starbucks was opening its first New York store, I remember his dismissal: “Cappuccino?” he scoffed, “Who’s going to pay four bucks for a cup of coffee?”
Nicky’s predictions are so consistently the opposite of the truth that an actor I know often asks him about her movies as a way to gauge their box office appeal. “
Silence of the What
?” I can still hear him ask incredulously.
Ten or so years ago, Best Cellars, a small store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, revolutionized wine sales by grouping wines according to taste (“Fresh,” “Juicy,” “Big,” “Sweet,” etc.) rather than by country or grape varietal. Cofounder Joshua Wesson realized that for everyday wine, people were more concerned with what a wine tastes like rather than from which incomprehensible appellation it hails. A radical approach, the strategy was so successful that Best Cellars was bought by the A&P supermarket chain in 2007. The only downside of this super user-friendliness is that it tends to limit the customer it initially seduces. At a certain point, some shoppers—the majority of our customers, we thought—would want to go deeper than “Sweet.” If we were going to try to make a unique and better wineshop, we would have to take a more sophisticated tack.
Our first stab was a shop as a wine library. We lined the room’s perimeter with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and rolling ladders. We laid out the floor in rows of waist-high bookshelves. We envisioned the doors with copper mesh panels and the woodwork painted glossy gray-green. “Like that store in which Catherine Deneuve worked in the
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
,” Becky had remarked. It was all very efficient, very pretty, and, aside from the fancy paint, much like any other liquor store you have ever visited. Walking in, you would have been confronted by thousands of bottles vying for your attention—exactly the intimidating overload we wanted to avoid.
In our next iteration, Becky and I took the opposite approach. Instead of wall-to-wall wine, we decided to highlight a few curated bottles and then create contexts for them to help our customers understand and feel confident about their choices.We envisioned miniature still lifes in which the bottles would be accompanied by pictures of the winemakers, a review or two pinned up on corkboards, and perhaps even bowls of the grapes from which those particular wines were made. We were valiantly trying to make the point that wine is handmade by real people who have a strong connection to their product. Upon further inspection, we discovered that this precious system would allow us to display a total of eleven bottles at a time. Besides, where in hell were we going to get bunches of Verdicchio grapes in the middle of winter?
I didn’t want
In Europe, a hands-off approach still dominates. Stores typically display one bottle of each selection, often behind closed cabinet doors. You must ask for help if you actually want to hold a bottle. New York’s Sherry-Lehmann recently renovated its flagship, using a similar model. Display bottles are under lock and key, and stock is sent up from the basement by notifying a clerk. Buying wine feels luxurious—and intimidating. Neither of these directions was particularly compelling to us.
My brother Nicolas was also one of those naysayers. “Who’s really going to buy wine down in that godforsaken neighborhood?” my skeptical sibling asked me. “Malt liquor, maybe,” he offered, “but
wine
?”
Nicky’s doubts juiced my enthusiasm. Despite being whip-smart (he’s an architect and successful real estate developer), my brother is staggeringly trend-deaf. When Starbucks was opening its first New York store, I remember his dismissal: “Cappuccino?” he scoffed, “Who’s going to pay four bucks for a cup of coffee?”
Nicky’s predictions are so consistently the opposite of the truth that an actor I know often asks him about her movies as a way to gauge their box office appeal. “
Silence of the What
?” I can still hear him ask incredulously.
Ten or so years ago, Best Cellars, a small store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, revolutionized wine sales by grouping wines according to taste (“Fresh,” “Juicy,” “Big,” “Sweet,” etc.) rather than by country or grape varietal. Cofounder Joshua Wesson realized that for everyday wine, people were more concerned with what a wine tastes like rather than from which incomprehensible appellation it hails. A radical approach, the strategy was so successful that Best Cellars was bought by the A&P supermarket chain in 2007. The only downside of this super user-friendliness is that it tends to limit the customer it initially seduces. At a certain point, some shoppers—the majority of our customers, we thought—would want to go deeper than “Sweet.” If we were going to try to make a unique and better wineshop, we would have to take a more sophisticated tack.
Our first stab was a shop as a wine library. We lined the room’s perimeter with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and rolling ladders. We laid out the floor in rows of waist-high bookshelves. We envisioned the doors with copper mesh panels and the woodwork painted glossy gray-green. “Like that store in which Catherine Deneuve worked in the
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
,” Becky had remarked. It was all very efficient, very pretty, and, aside from the fancy paint, much like any other liquor store you have ever visited. Walking in, you would have been confronted by thousands of bottles vying for your attention—exactly the intimidating overload we wanted to avoid.
In our next iteration, Becky and I took the opposite approach. Instead of wall-to-wall wine, we decided to highlight a few curated bottles and then create contexts for them to help our customers understand and feel confident about their choices.We envisioned miniature still lifes in which the bottles would be accompanied by pictures of the winemakers, a review or two pinned up on corkboards, and perhaps even bowls of the grapes from which those particular wines were made. We were valiantly trying to make the point that wine is handmade by real people who have a strong connection to their product. Upon further inspection, we discovered that this precious system would allow us to display a total of eleven bottles at a time. Besides, where in hell were we going to get bunches of Verdicchio grapes in the middle of winter?
I didn’t want
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