Best NYC Specialist Retail Stores

[J_D_o_v_e]

@Tom Reddick

One more store I would add to your excellent list is Wine Connection in Pound Ridge. There is not much on the website, but the store offerings are incredible and reach back quite far. Provenance is exceptional. It is not a cheap place to shop, but there is a real treasure trove there of well-stored bottles, and Max- the owner- is one of my favorite people in the wine business.

Yes, Max has a great selection and generally very good prices. And Max is a super guy. He used to post regularly on eBob. I guess he found better ways to spend his time. Too bad for us!

Agree RE: Max and Wine Connection. Highly recommended. John’s summary of the others works for me and I agree with the avoid Acker comment…

[Subu_Ramachandran]

Forgot to add

Some good wine: Specialize in island wines (Canary, Etna, Corsica etc.) they also have decent selection of Germany and Austrian wines.

[Zachary_Ross]

Vanderbilt Wine Merchants, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Formerly Passage de la Fleur. The store is great, emphasis on small producers and natural wines. It has evolved considerably since Fifi sold the place but one can still find a bunch wines from his portfolio there.

Vanderbilt Ave Wine Merchants • 573 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY

[lucaslabelle]

Shawn Fine Wines and Leon and Son are two great Brooklyn shops. Have dealt with both and have had wonderful experiences.

Both have a general list section but also lots of high end Burg, Bord, Cali and Italy.

Cheers!

[YacobovE]

A bit surprised not to see Tribeca Wine Merchants listed, particularly when the goal is putting together a parcel of recent vintages of burgundy, piedmont & rhone, they’re great at helping with those types of requests.

[Pat_Martin]

@David Glasser

Great summary John, saving this for my next visit to NY.
Any thoughts on Rochambeau in Dobbs Ferry? Worth a trip?

Yes, a small, cramped shop, but they have some interesting stuff. I found Navarro chardonnay there a couple of years ago – almost impossible to find around here. I try to stop in on the rare occasion I’m in that part of Westchester.

Say hi to Steve Austin from Mark Squires if you go.

[Jayson_Cohen]

@Tom Reddick

One more store I would add to your excellent list is Wine Connection in Pound Ridge. There is not much on the website, but the store offerings are incredible and reach back quite far. Provenance is exceptional. It is not a cheap place to shop, but there is a real treasure trove there of well-stored bottles, and Max- the owner- is one of my favorite people in the wine business.

Yes, Max has a great selection and generally very good prices. And Max is a super guy. He used to post regularly on eBob. I guess he found better ways to spend his time. Too bad for us!

Agree RE: Max and Wine Connection. Highly recommended. John’s summary of the others works for me and I agree with the avoid Acker comment…

Max is a great guy providing great personal service and excellent buys by email. Started buying there in 1999, sometimes website, sometimes email, sometimes in person in Pound Ridge. If he was in the City, I know I would have bought a lot more from him over the years.

[Jayson_Cohen]

@David Glasser

Great summary John, saving this for my next visit to NY.
Any thoughts on Rochambeau in Dobbs Ferry? Worth a trip?

Yes, a small, cramped shop, but they have some interesting stuff. I found Navarro chardonnay there a couple of years ago – almost impossible to find around here. I try to stop in on the rare occasion I’m in that part of Westchester.

Say hi to Steve Austin from Mark Squires if you go.

Mark Squires knows The Six Million Dollar Man?

[Jayson_Cohen]

Forgot to add

Some good wine: Specialize in island wines (Canary, Etna, Corsica etc.) they also have decent selection of Germany and Austrian wines.

I find them to have high prices but good close out sales and decent email offers. Good geeky French selection.

[David_Glasser]

Yes, a small, cramped shop, but they have some interesting stuff. I found Navarro chardonnay there a couple of years ago – almost impossible to find around here. I try to stop in on the rare occasion I’m in that part of Westchester.

Say hi to Steve Austin from Mark Squires if you go.

Mark Squires knows The Six Million Dollar Man?

Above my head…

[Pat_Martin]

Say hi to Steve Austin from Mark Squires if you go.

Mark Squires knows The Six Million Dollar Man?

Above my head…

Old story… a manager or co-owner at that outfit was posting on eBob under the nom de plume Steve Austin about all the great selection and pricing he saw there. Squires eventually got suspicious and outed him in a rather Squire-esque way. Made for some entertaining reading.

[MChang]

Zachy’s just sent out an email touting 30% off dom perignon and it was $159 on the 2009… smh

[lleichtman]

I hated Morrell. Never could get any service in there. Prices are OK but if it is something not on the outside shelves, it is hard to get help.

[MChang]

Their shipping is super expensive but their prices are good.

[Eric_Guido]

@Sh@n A

Names I see tossed around anecdotally are Sherry Lehman, Crush, Millesima, Chambers, Flat Iron, Astor Wine, Zachy, PJs, Italian Wine Merchants etc. But let’s say you wanted to work with someone to assemble a few cases of 2014-16 Burgundy… would you have a “go to” retailer in that scenario?

Morrell: With its Rockefeller Center location, you’d expect the worst, but the selection is very, very good, and the prices often aren’t bad. I’ve regularly bought there for tastings because they had the best price or were the only source. Very good in Burgundy, if that’s what you’re after, and very good on Barolo/Barbaresco these days.

John

Thank you, I’m so happy you feel this way. I’ll add one more thing, that I’m most proud of our people. Everyone under our roof is a wine lover and cares so much about their customers.

Thanks again

Of course, I work for Morrell, so I might be biased.

[MChang]

For once zachy’s has a few decent deals. Oreno for $50 isn’t bad. I grabbed some pycm and Barolo from morell

[alan_weinberg]

@John Morris

Burgundy Wine Co. They have a decent selection of Burgundy and Rhones, but I’ve never been that keen on the producers they stock and the never seem to have any deals. I don’t know anyone who shops there regularly. Not sure why, but they sort of dropped off the radar, at least in my circles. My impression is that they offer exceptional service to a loyal clientele and survive on that.

Wow- talk about bringing back old memories. Once upon a time, before winesearcher, before internet forums- indeed before the internet itself- Burgundy Wine Company was one of the most important sources for burgundy in the United States.

They got so much DRC back then that in addition to offering Assortiments as well as individual bottles, they made up and sold assortments of their own- one I remember in particular was 6 bottles of La Tache and 6 bottles of Richebourg.

Like Premier Cru, they issued a periodic newsletter- and you could actually get it in the mail, mull it over for a few days, call in- and most of the time you could get what you wanted. Different times.

And it was not just about wines like DRC- though they usually had several vintages of everything but RC and Montrachet available at any given point. A number of the wines we consider mainstream blue chips today were little-known treasures that BWC introduced to this market and worked very hard to promote.

Sadly, they did not do a good job of handling the very sudden change in the marketplace that happened in the late 90s- or at least not in my case. 1995 was the vintage where Bordeaux captured the attention of an unprecedented audience in the United States- but to a lesser extent it was happening with burgundy as well. 1995 was the vintage where a lot more customers and stores took an interest in fine burgundy- and once massive allocations taken by a few stores with little competition were suddenly being spread around.

There was one rare Montrachet in particular I used to buy from them- and I got 6 bottles of the 1994 vintage. When the 1995 came out, I was not even allowed a single bottle. I remember a very unpleasant conversation with, I believe, Geri at the time who pretty much laughed in my face and blew me off. And so I cut them off cold.

Then, in the early days of winesearcher before merchants knew to be careful about what they posted on their websites, their allocation of Roumier was posted for sale. I remember calling in and having a good laugh with a salesperson who was very understanding in explaining that they had never intended those wines be listed. I knew the odds were against the wines actually being available- but it confirmed they were still getting very good allocations of the rare wines even though they had lost their national presence to a great degree.

About 12 years ago I started getting phone calls from them- outreach efforts to their prior larger customer base. The really high end wines were not available, but I made a number of purchases- most of them gifts for burgundy friends in NYC- and they were always well received. And then once I started traveling to NYC regularly and discovered Crush and Chambers, I slowly slipped away.

John, I suspect you have it right- that much of their business is serving a long-time loyal local clientele. And with the market as it is today, they probably sell with great ease every blue chip bottle they have right in their own backyard. Still, I do recommend them to others. True most of what they offer the public are not well known names, but despite their shitty treatment of me once upon a time, I really do think they still pay a great deal of attention to the region and make an effort to source a lot of solid to very good wines which are not easily found here.

echoing Tom, back in the day when Al Hotchkin ran the store, before he died and girlfriend Geri took over, this was THE Burgundy wine store. It had everything and at great prices, old wines, new wines, amazing selections at fabulous prices—depth, width, length—everything. As Tom said, they contacted me also a decade ago trying to resurrect the fractured relationship, but individual cherries were now at lofty prices and not worth buying. I haven’t bought a bottle there in a decade or more. They are a shadow of what they were.

[Stan_Y]

There was one rare Montrachet in particular I used to buy from them- and I got 6 bottles of the 1994 vintage. When the 1995 came out, I was not even allowed a single bottle. I remember a very unpleasant conversation with, I believe, Geri at the time who pretty much laughed in my face and blew me off. And so I cut them off cold.

I am not sure how I missed this, but oh my - I had exactly the same experience at the same time except with Roumier and had no idea what was going on with that. Thanks Tom and Alan.

[Markus_S]

Here’s an example of what’s irksome about Zachy’s. I just got an e-mail touting prices up to 50% off. I was looking at Barolos:

They have the 2013 Vajra Albe marked down from $40 to $35. That’s only 12.5%, and there are three places in the NY area offering it for $29.

They show the 2012 Marchesi di Barolo Coste Rose marked down from $95 to $45. Sounds good, until you check and find that other retailers offer more desirable vintages for $43-$60.

The 2013 Vietti Castiglione is “marked down” from $75 to $50. The problem is that there are five other retailers in the NYC area on Wine Searcher that offer this for $43-$45.

The “regular” prices there are consistently a sham. And you always need to check the sale prices, because many times they’re well above the market.

And this is why I almost never take the bait anymore: such a waste of time trying to suss out if you are actually getting a deal. Add in hit-or-miss service and crossed shipping signals with them and they are easy to cross off your list, even if they do have a very extensive inventory.

How come nobody mentioned any shops in Brooklyn or Queens? There has to be places to go for good Greek selections or other offbeat wines.

[Markus_S]

Their shipping is super expensive but their prices are good.

Within NYS, I believe they offer free shipping with minimum purchase ($250+ I think).