I love the Interwebs. One reason is that a page like this can have cool stuff added, like the map on the right-hand side of this page.

I’ve been hammering and honing away at it for a while now, driving all over the metro area to check places out. Finally, it’s a semi-finished product — and it will remain a work in progress, because it’s my top 50 wines stores in the metro area. (The wine bars remain a work in progress, btw.)

Not only is it subjective, but stores will improve or decline and move onto or off the list. I not only reserve the right to change my mind; I wouldn’t be doing my job if the list stayed stagnant. For example, if I had done this list 3-4 months ago, the Top Ten store in Woodbury wouldn’t have made the cut. But since Bill Abrahamson came aboard to ramp up the wine inventory, it has emerged as an easy top-50 pick. And as he does the same thing for the other Top Ten/Northgate stores, they might pop onto the map and something else will drop off.

My criteria included the size of the wine inventory, but bigger factors were the quality of the offerings, fair pricing and the passion about wine expressed by the merchants. I’ll wriote later about how I rank the stores in these categories.

I still have some legwork to go, especially at some of the munis and chains. I continue to hope that that big ol’ hole in the northwest suburbs gets a dot or two someday. And I’m open to suggestions, criticism, etc.. for anything I might have left out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.