In the last few months, a handful of customers have expressed confusion, dismay, sometimes outright anger about our corkage policy.  What is our corkage policy?  If you don't want a glass of wine from the 6-7 selections we're pouring on any given night, you can grab any bottle off our walls, and for the price of the bottle plus $10 corkage, it's yours to open in our bar and enjoy for the night.  And every week on our Wine Cellar Wednesdays, there is no corkage fee at all.

     The idea of a hybrid wine store and wine bar in the same space is a relatively new idea in Los Angeles and it is entirely understandable thatit can cause confusion.  So at the risk of sounding dry and boring, here's why we do it:

A glass of wine at a bar or restaurant is drastically higher than what it costs you to buy a bottle of wine, bring it home, and pop it open in your living room. A bottle you might buy in our store for $20 has 4 full glasses of wine in it, costing you $5/glass if you brought it home. That exact same wine at a fine restaurant could be $10-$18 a glass.  With our corkage policy, you're paying $7.50/glass to have that wine in our store.  That little extra margin is what helps pay for your friendly neighborhood bartender, all those broken glasses, all the lovely plumbing issues that come with running a bar, and my stash of grape Big League Chew.  We hope that helps clear up any questions/concerns.  It's what we do to stay in business and continue to improve our selection and service.

     Your hosts/hostesses are great cooks who appreciate unique wines so you bring something wonderful. But when you present the wine, they thank you and put it away in their wine collection, never to be seen or tasted by you again. What do you do, if anything?

     We recently had the sommelier from a very fancy Los Angeles restaurant come in and tell us about a customer who was loudly proclaiming the subtle qualities of his bottle of Screaming Eagle ($1200/btl). But all the qualities he was describing for his date and the rest of the restaurant to hear were odd. So the sommelier asked to check the bottle and he realized it was corked beyond belief.....it was like smelling spoiled garbage. They drank down the whole thing happily. Do you tell them that they're not tasting what they're supposed to? Does it really matter if they like it? Is it the sommelier's responsibility to replace the bottle and risk embarrassing the customer?

     You're having friends over for dinner, you're really into wine and they're not... do you go for the nice stuff on your wine rack or do you 'dumb it down' and grab some of the simpler stuff? You wouldn't believe how much this comes up in our store. The debate is essentially, do you believe that good wine can only be appreciated by someone who has been tasting wine for awhile, or can it be properly enjoyed by all?

     Post your comments here.  After the homepage poll results are all in after a couple of weeks, we'll weigh in as well.

     A friend of ours lost money on this bet recently so we thought we’d clear up a common misunderstanding so none of you wander into your local sports bar and interrupt the football game to bet someone about the pronunciation of “Meritage.” A “Meritage” wine is not French and does not rhyme with “triage”, it rhymes with “heritage” and is a marketing term dreamt up in 1988 by a group of American vintners.  This proprietary name was chosen from 6000 entries and is a combination of the words “merit” and “heritage”, used to identify wines made from the noble Bordeaux varietals of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc most commonly, but can include Petit Verdot and Malbec or for white Meritage, Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, and Sauvignon Vert.  The Meritage Society believes strongly in these blends having the same status as noble single varietals and wish to separate them out from the more basic “table wines” of the wine world. Isn’t it odd that “table wine” has a pejorative connotation? Do we put our fancy pure varietals on something besides a table? I think we should put a moratorium on new marketing names for wines. It’s confusing enough already.