Wine Shop Wednesday: An Update on Water Tower Fine Wines

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This is the one of several posts from David Lazarus about the intricacies of opening and running a wine shop. David owns and runs Water Tower Fine Wines in Mount Washington.

It has been some time since I have updated our travels through the start up of a new wine store. Well, a lot has gone on through the last several months. We have ironed out the glitches in our Point of Sale system for the most part. The store has been operating fairly smoothly and we have had fantastic turnout for our Friday night tastings. We have officially started up Saturday afternoon tastings and we are beginning to see attendance increase at those tastings. We have held several Premium Tastings, that we have moved to Monday night. These have been well attended and give a more intimate group a chance to sample a more focused selection of wines. This Month we will be sampling six single vineyard Pinot Noirs from Merry Edwards. We have had two successful Sparkling Brunches, the first sampling 8 grower champagnes and the second eight Franciacorta Sparkler.

We have been learning a lot from our customers. Our selection has more than doubled to just over 1300 different wines, including more than 140 sparkling wines , 50 Rose’ (no white zinfandel) and almost sixty Rieslings. We have made an effort to carry wines that may not be found elsewhere. We have been lucky enough to be able to offer dozens of distributor closeouts, some as much as fifty percent off of retail. My wife, Jan, has repeatedly come up with great dishes to pair with the wines tasted.

I have had the opportunity to sample some fantastic wines from all over the world, which gives me a greater knowledge base to assist our customers in selecting the right wine. Our redecorating and improvement of our building is almost complete. We have achieved the homey atmosphere we wanted with our cozy tasting areas which can seat nearly sixty people. Our web site is fully operational and offers a calendar of our tastings. We have fine tuned our weekly e-mails that can be signed up for through our web site.

We have seen solid growth since the first of the year. With the coming of summer we look forward to being able to better use our shaded deck and try some new ideas for tastings. We welcome input from you, what are we doing right and what are we doing wrong. Most importantly we have been thrilled with the loyal following we have developed in just under eight months. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have or any wines you are having trouble locating.

Thanks for your continued interest!