Best wine shops in LA?

If you’re looking for fun experiences and good tastings, it’s hard to go wrong with LOU as echoed by many here.

I second DTLAEater. Winesearcher.com is your friend. I drink much of what you listed except Super Tuscan and will typically price shop here in LA during summer months when it’s too hot to ship or elsewhere when the weather is more temperate.

That being said, Lincoln Fine Wines has a nice selection. I have often bought Lapierre or Foillard by the case from DomaineLA and LOU. BH Cheese and also Milkfarm in Eagle Rock has a nice selection. Omotesando gave a great suggestion to focus on importers. You can ask importers who carries them heavily. The list Omo gives of importers is terrific and I would add Oliver Crum, Rudi Weist and Skurnik.

Steve Golden’s site https://enofinewine.com/ is also excellent.

My favorite “wine bar” is the bar at Providence with that awesome cheese cart. We sometimes go for just wine and cheese.

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Love Lincoln Fine wine! Great shop

Agreed! Great selection and super knowledgeable staff, I love supporting them.

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I don’t use Wine-Searcher much these days but I believe their free version only lists sources that are paying them for the service. In order to see ALL the places they scrub from online sources you have to pay for their PRO version. I don’t know how much PRO costs now but I recall that it greatly increased the number of places shown that carried a wine I’d search for.

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Gads! But Mr. Kurniawan swears by their provenance! :smiley:

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Yeah but I need in quality in that quantity… of course I could buy x2 half bottles but that ends up being a bit less cost effective. Cuz dats how I rollz…

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I’m definitely a sake geek at heart, but I’m learning more wine and appreciation just to understanding structure, pairing, acidity etc better (and understand sake and pairing from a better viewpoint).

Anthill has been a label/producer that I’m really really enjoying of late, and it’s great value coming from the former makers of Williams Seylem (which I’ve never tasted anything from them yet sadly). The gems are in the older vintages. Peters, Baker Ranch, Campbell Ranch are some of my favorites. I poured the 2010 Anthill Farms Tina Marie Vineyards to a sake producer friend from Hyogo Prefecture when he visited NorCal in May, and he loved it to bits (a bit lighter bodied, but far more nuanced than wines made in Japan with Koshu grape…acquired taste…it’s worse than Niigata sake with that razor quick finish which is a travesty for red wine).

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I am well aware of this…hence my reference for “gits and shiggles”.

Seeing unicorn sake and first growth in non climate control conditions in a jack of all trades, dried seafood and dried goods store is great fun for the iPhone and social media. The unicorn sake is either unpasteurized or single pasteurized, and needs to be kept in cold storage…unfortunately the seller and local customers don’t know ;-). Even if at wine cellar temperature it is being tortured to a slow death.

I better find other places to visit and things to do if I’m in that area, might not make a special trip across town just for photographing and laughing…

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Big selection of Loire wines, quite possible, since that’s a hotbed of natural wine. Otherwise, those categories aren’t ones you’ll find a big selection of at natural wine shops.

bows

I have Wine Searcher Pro and it is $65 a year. I use it all the time though, particularly because I am often hunting down limited distribution wines. Although, on the other hand, out of curiosity, I just did a Wine Searcher Free search versus Wine Searcher Pro search for Fossil & Till Sparkling Riesling - a very nice wine that I recently had at a restaurant in New York – and the same three wine stores came up on the free version of Wine Searcher as on the Pro Version (alas, all of them on the East Coast and it is way too hot to ship now).

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That should mean that those three are the only stores that have that wine listed on line.

That may be, but only the tiniest of wine shops don’t list their inventory on line. The three East Coast stores that carry the Fossil & Till Sparkling Riesling are also the only three that came up through a Google search as having current inventory.

Maybe there is some tiny other store somewhere that carries that wine, but I am not going to chase through the five boroughs of New York looking for it, so Wine Searcher it is. I knew there would be no West Coast distribution – it is just too small a producer. I did just find another Finger Lakes producer with a non-sparkling Riesling available at Hi-Time Wine Cellar in Orange County, so it is good to know that there is some Finger Lakes wine for sale in California. My goodness, I see that Wally’s even has two Finger Lakes Rieslings for sale. Several years ago I walked in Wally’s on Westwood, looking for wine, I think from the Loire, if I recall correctly, and they laughed at me . . .

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The Loire? Get out of here, you flavor-hating elite freak!

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Topical. Txakolina from k&l at lacma jazz

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I don’t understand. Are you saying you went into Wally’s for a specific wine from the Loire and they didn’t have it (perfectly understandable) or that they didn’t have ANY wines from the Loire?
If it’s the latter then I’m not sure that computes with what I’ve seen. And no one has ever laughed at me at Wally’s. They’re always quite polite. I’ve shopped at Wally’s for the better part of 20 years. This is some crazy talk.

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Productions for things we chase aren’t big enough for listings, inventories and reliability. You just go and get best you can and best believe Wally’s will always have bottles to satisfy you. Fuck that @ internet inventory

S[quote=“frommtron, post:56, topic:10258, full:true”]
I don’t understand. Are you saying you went into Wally’s for a specific wine from the Loire and they didn’t have it (perfectly understandable) or that they didn’t have ANY wines from the Loire?
If it’s the latter then I’m not sure that computes with what I’ve seen. And no one has ever laughed at me at Wally’s. They’re always quite polite. I’ve shopped at Wally’s for the better part of 20 years. This is some crazy talk.
[/quote]

They looked down their nose and sneered at me because I wasn’t looking for a trophy Burgundy or some such. I have never forgotten it. I forgot what region I was looking for, but they basically said we don’t really carry wines from there. It was a number of years ago.

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Gotcha. That makes much more sense. It must have been another region you were asking about.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience at Wally’s. Anyone can be an asshole at any time! I’ve had good conversations about beer and spirits with the buyers often.
Wally’s is definitely more of a normie wine shop with lots of high end juice. If it wasn’t on a route I travel often, I wouldn’t go out of my way to get to them. They do have some great spirits that not everyone stocks so there is that.

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The pro version of wine-searcher sometimes finds a lot more than the free version, which sometimes finds none. I use it all the time to research prices and I’m pretty sure I save more than $65 a year.

There’s some garbage data, e.g. one shop I know lists I think every wine they’ve ever sold and maybe some they’ve never had in stock. Some stores’ lists are updated only quarterly so they’ll be sold out of some things and have others that aren’t listed.

Most independent wine shops I know (including in LA Lou’s, Silverlake, and Psychic) don’t have their inventory online. If they’re not looking for mail-order or delivery business, it’s extra work and expense.