At an election gathering last night, we were enjoying a fabulous cheese from Spain, smoked Idizabal. My friend Joe (not a plumber) asked me where it came from, and I started talking about the place, one of the E’s Cheese Shops located next to the Wine Markets in Woodbury and Mendota Heights.

What I really liked about the place, I told him, was how beautifully chosen the smallish selection was, focused and … manageable. We got to talking about how overwhelming the (wonderful) cheese selection at a place like Surdyk’s can be. An invaluable resource but sometimes, well, simply too much. It can be refeshing to go to a place with a more limited but just as well-chosen inventory, we agreed.

The same can hold for wine stores. I’ll never stop shopping at the somewhat larger outlets, but there’s something about places like the Wine Thief and the Little Wine Shoppe in St. Paul and Excelsior Vintage. Their smaller inventories put us at ease, and because the selection is so carefully chosen due to space limitations, they have more of an identity. It’s just easier to develop a kinship, or at least a comfort level, in such places.

Earlier in the day yesterday, I had been talking with restaurant savant Rick Nelson about the recent closings of jP’s American Bistro and the Collisters’ meat emporium at Farm in the Market. There were logistical problems attached to both places, we agreed, but we shared another misgiving: It’s easy to fall into the “oh, I’ll get there soon” trap. And then they’re gone, and we can’t get there.

This week’s Liquid Assets column is about restaurants that are puting forth a special effort to make wine more affordable in this challenging (for them and us) economic times. Just as these are the kinds of places I find worth supporting, so, too are the smaller wine stores out there that are striving to bring us a distinctive array of wines. I’m going to make a special effort to appreciate them physically as well as mentally, lest they become mere memories.

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