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December 7, 2006

I haven't written about wine in a long time-- i didn't have the time , energy or patience.
After going to a local wine store last night though, now I'm going to start again.

I live in Williamsburg , Brooklyn. I've been here for about 5 years. I admittedly came in at the tail end of the gentrification: when rents were doubling and everything was pretty safe and clean.

When I moved to WB, rents had doubled and stabalized to something still well under manhattan prices. $500 apartments were going for $1000. Similar places in manhattan were $2000.

A few years ago though, on the cusp of rezoning, gentrification fully stopped and repaving began.

I use the term repaving, because gentrification is a form of revitalizating a neighborhood -- which had occured. While people screamed of displacement then, displacement was relatively small, as most housing was happening to converted units.

Repaving, I think, is a better fit. The city officially decided that it didn't like the mixed-income community that gentrification provided, nor did it like the look of the neighborhood -- so city officials , elected and appointed, took a lot of bribes and formed a lot of companies, and decided to demolish the whole neighborhood and just make a nice upper class community.

So what does that have to do with wine?

Three years ago my friendly neighborhood wine shop carried a selection of about 150 bottles with about 50% of them < $10 a bottle and 75% < 15. The prices weren't all that great -- they were still marked up a bit over what a savvy wine shopper would pay , but they weren't that pad. Three years later, the selection was about 20% under $10, and the bulk in the $10-$18 range. With a recent owner change, that selection is now 5%< 10, 50% 12-20 , and the rest $20 and above.

I'll also publicly state that I would no longer call the shop 'friendly' - the markup is officially insane. A $6 bottle on the other side of the river goes for $9 or $10 there. a $12-14 bottle goes for $18.

And, sadly, several other shops around here are doing the same.

So i've decided to start blogging about wine. Not about wines that I like or don't (though I might), but about buying and finding wine in NYC.

A big part of learning about wine is being able to take a risk -- trusting what a wine retailer says in their description, and taking your learnings from that trip and tasting to your next visit to that shop and to others.

So I'm going to blog about my approach to finding wine and wine retailers, and learning what I trust and don't trust about them.

Posted by Jonathan at December 7, 2006 3:34 PM

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