As noted elsewhere, I recently moved from Greenpoint to Red Hook. Since the demise of LeNell’s, whose wine selection and service frankly sucked, being based on animal labels and boundless self-regard, respectively, my new nabe lacks a real bottle shop. In search of something more or less local, I biked the 5 minutes up to Smith & Vine in Cobble Hill.
It’s a little shop, wines in the $20s around the outside, and a well-chosen $12-and-under island in the center, reds to the north, whites to the south. (They carry liquor, too, which, along with their location, must drive up their price structure a bit…) I picked up a couple of nice standards: an 03 la baronne dom. Ligneres, and an 07 Calea Nero d’Avola, from reliable Polaner Selections. Most of the budget stuff is 14% and over — not a lot of low-extraction Loire — but I didn’t see a bottle I wouldn’t be pleased to bring to a friend’s house for dinner.
I grabbed a $15 Fino (Alvear’s Montilla, imported by Tempranilo Inc.) from the well-priced ports-and-sherries shelf, ‘cause I’m cooking chicken livers, and I gots to deglaze, man. Then the weirdness happened.
When I walked in, I said hi to the guy working there, a guy kinda like me: hirsute, besepectacled, Jewishish; he gave me half a hairy eyeball in return. Hmm. When I finished making my choices, he rang me up. Wanting to complement him on the $12-and-under rack, I said, “You’ve got some nice budget selections.” The eyeball got hairier, and, with something that might easily be confused with a sneer, he replied, “We try to provide for all… categories.” He charged me $39, and didn’t give me a receipt. I didn’t want to ask. I took a book of matches. He looked displeased that I did.
I don’t know, maybe he was having a bad day. Lord knows we all have enough of them. I know I wasn’t unfriendly — not manic, not weird, just a guy in jeans and sweater, with reflective ankle straps (hereafter: dorkstraps) and bike gloves, no spandex or nothing. AFAIK, I’m the kind of customer they want: the one who’ll come in regularly for $12-and-unders, and occasionally spring for the Connobium I spotted in the southwest corner. I didn’t complain; I complemented. Yet the response I got was a bit… well, corked. Maybe I misread it, but I had no reason to.
Smith & Vine, 246 Smith St., Cobble Hill, BK. I’ll try them again. I’ll be cautiously optimistic. But perhaps I should downgrade that to optimistically cautious.
