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WINE COUNTRY THIS WEEK | WINE COUNTRY NEWS
More Than 250 Quality Wines
Under $25 at Wine Garage
Hidden next to a dilapidated ’40s-era former filling station on Highway 29
in Calistoga lies the Wine Garage. A unique wine shop in Napa Valley that retails
all wine in the store under $25. Sound crazy? Its true. And the proprietors Todd
and Joy Miller, have hit on a niche in the Valley that had been very missed by the
locals there.
“There are a lot of winemakers here that can’t afford to drink the wine they
make” says Miller. “That’s crazy, yes, but who can afford to drink a $65 bottle with
dinner every night?”
Many people miss The Wine Garage on the first try upvalley, but the search
is well worth it. Miller stocks wine from all of California’s wine growing regions
including fifty Napa selections and 40 from Sonoma County. When he first sought
out buying the initial inventory, “I enlisted a local farmer buddy and his 15-foot
box van and off we went all over California hunting down the deals. I tried to seek
out the small producers who didn’t have distributors so I could pass the savings
on to my customers.” And Miller did just that. His store is stocked with highquality
juice all under $25 and all are unique. Most labels in the shop are unrecognizable
– but all pass the same test; everything passes over Miller’s lips before
he makes a buy. “If I don’t love it, I don’t buy it, period. Sometimes I will taste
over a hundred wines in one day, load up the truck and haul it up to Calistoga,
unload at the store, and maybe I will crawl in bed by 3 a.m. Needless to say my
buddy bowed out of the deal after their second trip. I initially recruited him on a
‘hey lets go wine tasting in Santa Barbara’ until he realized how much work it
entailed. Poor guy, he had to be at the farm at 5 in the morning.”
It is all worth it. Millers’ customers love him. He has a unique ability to hear a
verbal description of a customer’s favorite wine and translate that into a recommendation
for sometimes a third of the cost. “I have people all over the country
that use me as their local wine shop. I ship right to their door – and the cost of the
shipping is a drop in the bucket compared to what they save on the cost of the
wine.
Miller gets deals on Napa wine too. “I have winemakers from small wineries
stop in every week saying ‘I have something that will fit into the store,’ if they only
have 15 or 25 cases of an end-of-vintage wine – I am the perfect outlet for them.”
So head up to the Wine Garage and check out the best deals in the Valley at
1020 Foothill Blvd (Hwy 29), Calistoga, CA 94515. For more information, call
(707) 942-5332. You can also check out the website at winegarage.net.
www.WineCountryThisWeek.com
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