No Place Like Home

No Place Like Home
Why Stores That Sell
Locally Produced Wines
Are a National Trend
February 15, 2008; Page W5

 Article URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120302207155669373.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

One of the great joys of visiting Italy is spending time in its regional enotecas, which are kind of living museums of the local wines. You can stay for hours, chatting with knowledgeable pourers and sampling wines from down the road or up in the hills. There are few better ways to get a taste — quite literally — of the region. And here’s good news: Regional enotecas have begun springing up in America, too.
These specialty wine shops not only are a marvelous way to sample a region’s wines at just one stop, but they often have on hand tiny-production wines from local wineries that are so small they’re rarely or never open to the public. Invariably, you’ll find serious boosters behind the counter, people who are eager to pour you a taste or sell you a bottle of wine made by passionate winemakers in their communities.

A while back, we wrote about a newly opened regional enoteca in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, tucked into a little space on the way to Concourses D and E. It’s called the Yadkin Valley Wine Bar and it features only the wineries of the state’s Yadkin Valley. About 50 wines from seven of Yadkin’s wineries are available for tasting right now, for a small fee.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., there’s a stylish little shop called Vinocruz tucked off the beaten path in downtown that sells 185 wines from 64 area wineries. While some of the wines on its shelves enjoy pretty broad distribution, such as Ridge, Martin Ray, Bonny Doon and Thomas Fogarty, many others are small-production wines from such family-owned wineries as McHenry, Varner and Cooper-Garrod. As we stood there, surrounded by so many wines that we would never otherwise see, we felt like kids in a candy shop, or perhaps our daughter Media in a great shoe store.

Read the full article at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120302207155669373.html?mod=googlenews_wsj