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WINE COUNTRY THIS WEEK | WINE COUNTRY NEWS
Quality Wines All Under $25
at Wine Garage, Calistoga
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 an large assortment from Napa and Sonoma counties and other California
appellations. 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 high-quality 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.
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