Can we sell it AFTER its time?!

New York grocery stores want to sell wine. I say, bring it on!

When I went to college in Iowa, I enjoyed going to the local grocery store because I could stock up on the week's supplies: milk, chips, Ramen noodles, mac-and-cheese, and wine. Yup, wine. I enjoy wine, although my economic situation has rarely afforded me the opportunity to indulge that particular interest much beyond keeping a few bottles of red and port on hand. (Plus the small bottle of 1989 Sauternes I am aging until I sell my first novel.)

Unfortunately, in New York State, grocery stores are not allowed to sell wine. You have to go to liquor stores to get it. Now, in Buffalo, this isn't a problem at all: we have a lot of "liquor superstores" in the region, with the Premier Group being the best-known. In fact, there are three such stores within a ten-minute drive of my home (and two of those are within five minutes, and the closer of those two is just a ten-minute walk away). It's not like wine is hard to get in New York, unless you live in one of the smaller towns where the liquor store is just mildly less scary than a large-city bus station.

But it would still be great to be able to get wine in a grocery store -- especially a store like mine, whose focus in the last couple of years has been on meal preparation and in helping shoppers to select ingredients and offer suggestions for how to cook and entertain. Wine would be an invaluable part of that focus, and I can only imagine it would be immensely helpful for shoppers who are looking to get a bottle of wine to go with the meal they're preparing that day to be able to get that bottle of wine without having to make an additional stop somewhere else.

For serious oenophiles, I doubt that the grocery stores will ever really compete. There's only so much shelf-space to go around, and someone whose interest lies in collecting wine or maintaining a decent home cellar probably won't find much of use in a grocery store. Certainly that was the case at the Iowa grocery store I frequented ten years ago: the selection was all Gallo and Bolla.

One concern expressed in the Buffalo News article linked is the fear that grocers here would do the same: stock the most popular California wines and ignore the fine local producers. I would greatly hope that this would not be the case. New York State ranks second in wine production in the United States, and I for one would be greatly nonplused if I saw that local wines weren't being stocked on the shelves of local stores.

Still, I love the idea of wine being available in the grocery stores. "Wine is food," as the Frugal Gourmet used to say, and putting it in the grocery stores will only help to see it as such.