Best Cellars

Best Cellars, I miss you. Please come back to DC. (No, I will not go to your Arlington store.)

I love Tasty Tuesdays at Best Cellars! It’s a great tasting event for people who love wine but are not connoisseurs. For $ 10, you get to taste six wines (refills allowed) and hear a presentation about a particular wine region. I’ve been to four so far, and I’ve learned a lot! The last one was a «California vs. France» face-​off. France won by just two points :) They also have yummy cheeses and other munchies like olives and grapes.

J’adore Best Cellars, the first place I go when I need a bottle of good cheap wine.
After my jaunt to Hello Cupcake yesterday, I walked into Best Cellars immediately looking distressed. The woman about to do a tasting recognized my nonverbal cue and asked if I needed help. I was in the market for a wine to go with the beef and potatoes R was making for dinner, and wouldn’t taste too shabby with the ludicrously expensive cupcakes I’d just bought for dessert. The saleswoman was polite and friendly, and asked me a ton of questions to make sure I picked just the right wine. She suggested a 2008 Malbec that was fantastic with both dinner and dessert. Awesomeness.

Best Cellars is an interesting concept: limit your wine selection to under 100 wines, generally all slightly better than their $ 10-​$ 20 price tag, and train your staff especially well at identifying and describing them. Most of them seem to subscribe to the Gary Vaynerchuk school of wine descriptions, which makes them all seem folksy and non intimidating to those who just need a bottle of wine to bring to a friend’s place for dinner.
And really, that’s what this place is best at… the gift wine. You’re not going to find any stunning gems in this place (or at least I haven’t yet), but you’ll be moderately happy with almost any wine they suggest. If you are looking for something that is a bit more special, try Zola Wine or head out to the ‘burbs.

After leaving my horrible hair experience at the Hair Cuttery a few doors down, I decided that I needed to drown my sorrows in a good pinot noir.
Best Cellars is the cutest little wine shop just popped into my view.
Nice wine selection, and friendly staff, and more importantly good prices. And lucky me there was 15% off for buying three bottles.

Brrr. The first icy Jet Stream blast almost knocked me off my bike as I rode up Conn. Ave this evening and nearly chilled my marrow. But then I remembered what I love most about Best Cellars – its daily 5:30 to 8:00 wine tasting! Just what I needed to warm the cockles of my heart. (What are cockles anyway?) Rain, shine, sleet, or gloom of night they always have four bottles of decent wine to sample. Tonight it was a tasty french Viognier, a Cotes du Rhone, an Aussie Syrah, and a superb Tempranillo. The Tempranillo sells for $ 42 a bottle, and I appreciated that they opened a bottle for tasting. How many Harris Teeter or Balducci’s would do that?
The staff are alway friendly, helpful, and even knowledgeable. And they don’t sell lottery tickets!
Nice simple business concept: one product; lots of types. May they survive these tough economic times. (Me too, as I don’t want to have to go back to the Ripple or MD 20 – 20).

I have only one experience to share about Best Cellars, but it was spectacular. I went to a $ 10 wine tasting there this week, and it was so much fun! The focus was «syrah» so we tried 6 different types of syrah and also had some sparkling syrah to start. Besides the fact that my boyfriend and I had plenty of delicious wine to be completely shwasted by the end of the tasting, the wine distributor who gave the talk was amazing.
He knew so much about the agronomy of how wine is produced and had interesting stories about winemakers. He was a bit of a historian, philosopher and wine connoisseur all in one. We left the tasting drunk, happy, and with a bottle of sparkling syrah.
I would definitely recommend coming to the wine-​tastings. You can call about their schedule. They have them around once a month on Tuesdays and you need to RSVP ahead of time.

I really like the concept and I do buy quite a bit of wine here — I just can’t stand the attitude that I get sometimes. I live the the neighborhood and do yoga next door so I often stroll in for the tastings. 60% of the time, the person doing the tasting is rude. I almost always buy one of the wines they are tasting too so I really don’t know what their problem is.
That said, not everyone is rude, I have just had that experience a lot. I prefer to buy my wine at Trader Joe’s where everyone is super friendly. They also have a great selection of moderately priced wines and some good tasting a lot of nights of the week.

I’m a big fan of this place.
I’ll be honest and say I haven’t always known a whole bunch about wine. In fact, I still don’t know that much about wine. However, the good folks over at Best Cellars will help you find a good wine, and not make you broke in the process.
The store isn’t that big, but the unique «wall» system is interesting. The wines are divided into various categories, such as «Soft,» «Juicy,» «Smooth,» etc. This is great for beginners who are trying to figure out what types of wine they enjoy. The staff is proactive, and if you look confused at all the choices, they will ask if you need some help selecting a wine.
Best Cellars also features daily wine tastings, which are great. On any given day they will be sampling three or more different wines, which are generally all $ 15 or less per bottle. These tastings are a great chance to get to try new things, and learn about all the different types of wines there are out there.
Since Best Cellars focuses mostly on $ 15 and under wines, you won’t find a giant selection of super fancy (read: expensive) wines. They do have a limited selection of more expensive wines, but their main focus is providing really good wines at a good price. They succeed at this, and are very nice and friendly to boot.
And any place that can put up with the throngs of people who come by for wine tastings on a daily basis and not go crazy gets bonus points in my book. Remember, be kind to the staff and always be ready with your I.D. It’s their job to ask you for I.D. and stop making it seem like it’s such a hassle for you because you turned 21 six months ago.

wine tasting on wednesdays, good selection of wines at very good prices.
i got a nice torrontes (argentinian white grape) for 9 $ — sweet!

Would you look at me right now? I’m working HARD to become a yuppie. I’m literally smoking a cigar outside, using the wifi on my Mac laptop to write this review. Gross, I know.
But alas, despite my overwhelming desire to become a yuppie, I remain a poor graduate student and simply can’t afford the lifestyle. If I COULD afford it, however, and lived in the area, I would swing by this wine shop every couple of weeks to buy a few middle of the road bottles of wine to eat with dinner and share with friends.
My impression, based on one visit, is that this is a great table wine place, but they probably have a deeper selection than I’m giving them credit for.
I’m from California (again, I’m working on my yuppie cred here) and have recently gotten into wine tasting. The friendly employee at Best Cellars didn’t exactly blow me away with her descriptions of each of the wines — I know — I sound REALLY cosmopolitan right now, but she did have us taste four reasonably priced bottles of wine, three of which I normally wouldn’t have considered purchasing. I went home with two of them and my girlfriend and I enjoyed one this evening.
Swing by this wine shop, especially if you know what you like, and grab a couple of bottles of wine. If you purchase a couple of bottles just outside of my price range, toast to me, the guy who chose to major in the humanities in college and now can only pretend to afford the lifestyle.

If you like CHEAP wine and you only care whether it’s red or white or sparkling or flat, then by all means, come one, come all. Stop off on your way to a party. This is the store for you.
However, If you like good wine, knowledgeable sales associates, and a store organized the way a wine drinker buys their wine, then go to Paul’s on Wisconsin avenue.

What a great concept… a store with an interesting selection of inexpensive wines AND a helpful staff. I was pleasantly surprised by my visit to Best Cellars. Not knowing a lot concerning the finer points of wine (other than it tastes good), it was helpful to have both descriptions for everything on display and a staff that can manage to not talk above my head. It’s wine people… do we really need to get all snotty about it? They encourage their customers to try new things, and the organization of the wines into types (sweet white, dry white, dessert, sparkling) makes more sense to me than the system based on countries that you find in most shops. The vast majority of the wines here are under $ 20, which is great for those of us who want something a little more refined than, oh, Boone’s Farm but don’t want to break the bank. I will definitely stop here often for my wine purchasing needs.

Let me preface this review by saying that on my last trip from Buenos Aires, my carry-​on consisted of 20 bottles of wine. This tells you two things: I’m probably a wino and I like good finds. Best Cellars loses its superlative when ranked on these metrics.
Best Cellers is kind of like the Ikea of wine: there are some cheap hidden gems buried in a mess of junk, things are organized in a way that only makes sense to the company, and the employees tend not to care or know much more than it takes to be conversant. Most of their stuff can be found at any decent liquor store (see my review of Chat’s Liquors… the selection is pretty much the same in a prettier layout), and if they don’t have what you want, it’s hit and miss if the staff know enough to point you in the right direction. When I was looking for a Bonarda/​Malbec, they were able to recommend a decent bottle. However, the Torrentes they said was good (it was their only bottle) I had had before and knew that it tasted like store-​brand apple juice and not the crisp treat that it should be. They had no good substitutions for the Carmenere I had asked for and pointed me toward a merlot instead of a cabernet, which probably would have been a closer match.
I know, this seems like a lower than three stars review, and I guess I’m being a bit harsh. This place is great if you just want to duck in and pick up something cheap on your way to a dinner or if you want to try something new that you’re not sure if you’ll like without breaking the bank. It’s certainly less intimidating than going to Calvert Woodley or Rodman’s, but the knowledge level drops to compensate (and sometimes the pretension does not).

I’ve gotten some GREAT bottles at Best Cellars. When I met my lovely bride on
(yes, it’s a long story involving another woman who put an ad up in my name without telling me …), I was a consultant in LA and she was in Trinidad-​and-​Tobago-​of-​all-​places.
Well, in Trinidad a couple of things you cannot find easily are great red wine and top-​dollar coffee. You may know that Nescafe is all the rage in Central and South America. Ick.
Anyway, after hot emails and hotter phone calls, we had to meet. We did, with all the caveats: There may not be chemistry, so I’ll sleep on the couch and I have no expectations; we’ll still be friends no matter what; etc.
And, Angela said, could you bring some RED WINE and COFFEE? And Harpers? And the New Yorker?
I did. And the red wine came from Best Cellars. Cue the Wedding March from Lohengrin.
So, BEST CELLARS ROCKS.

I have to confess that I have mixed feelings about this place — I think the format sets up well for people that have just started to get into wine — or just want to drink good wine and not have to do a lot of research — and there also some wines here that you won’t find any place else. Randall Graham has done some exclusive bottlings for them… so that’s all good.
It’s fun… what could possibly be wrong with this picture.
Wine geek soul…
I want to buy my wine from a geek. Someone that really gets excited about wine… someone that has drunk a lot of good, and yes, their share of bad wine, someone that has been drinking wine for a number of years…
Someone that uses words like «extracted» and «jammy» — their little labels with «juicy» or «soft» really piss me off. I am sorry — it’s a problem I am working on…
They do do tastings almost every night — which is really nice — and something that any good wine merchant should do. I just find the selection somewhat limited — and their vocabulary offensive.
I know… it’s just me…
UPDATE
I have been buying up 04s from Spain. They had the Alto Moncayo 2004 Campo de Borja — which really surpised me – but they were selling it for 60 bucks a bottle — they only had six bottles and I had not seen it in a retail store — so I bought a couple of bottles — well, stupid me – you can buy it online for $ 42. They also had Clio at $ 53 — and that I at least knew I could find for $ 35…ugh.
The bad news is I got screwed. The good news is they are improving their selection — and I have a couple of bottles of beautiful grenache. I will not let the price I paid bother me… I will not let the price I paid bother me… I will not let the price I paid bother me… I will not let the price I paid bother me… I will not let the price I paid bother me…

At the end of the month it can be downright embarrassing to see how much I’ve spent on non-​essentials. At the very top of my non-​essential vendors list would be my absolute go-​to wine store Best Cellars in Dupont.
When you walk in the door there is always someone armed with at least three free wine samples and sometimes they work snacks into the equation. There are also knowledgeable employees who never disappoint in their recommendations (as long as you know what you like) and there is a wide range of prices so you can keep it under a Hamilton or drop a Benjamin, accordingly. They also have themed nights (such as champagne for V-​day, great holiday wines, etc) and even private events with experts (the monthly newsletter usually has details).
And, while you could qualify Best Cellars as a chain, I’d say having just seven stores nationwide hardly classifies it as the McDonalds of wine vendors. And, one benefit to having a little more capital to spend is that the Web site features a wine diary where you can sniff and sip and keep record of your favorites.
Speaking of – here are three of mine you should try soon:
–Lambrusco & Ancellotta– a red wine with a champagne attitude (in fact, the cork «pops,» though you use a wine opener). It’s a deep purple, some hints of spice and back cherries with a fabulous froth. A very exciting pick!
–La Sera’s Barbera — a food-​friendly wine with the smooth taste and very subtle hints of berry. It’s great for any dinner party or sipping in front of the TV on your average weeknight (not that I would know or anything).
–Santa Julia Syrah Rose’ —Described as a «sexy» wine, I love how soft and easy it is to drink. This is a very party friendly wine as I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying a glass or two.

Now this is a wine shop I can handle. First, the prices. There are hundreds of wines here priced under twenty bucks. That makes it much easier to say «I’ll bring the wine.»
The staff is friendly and fun. They are all about helping you find the right wine. Not that it is too difficult to do here. The wines are arranged in the store are arranged by taste. Each shelf or section of shelves has a heading that describes as closely as possible what you can expect from each bottle.
All of that and free tastings most afternoons! Also, you can find cute wine accessories like a wine tote that is made out of wet suit material.

Free tastings every evening! Sometimes they’re themed — e.g. for Super Bowl weekend they paired the wines with popcorn, with chips, and with pretzels — So you’d know which wines taste great with the junk food! So funny.
I’m no wine expert, so I’ve often relied on the staff’s expertise. E.g. I’ll tell them I’m going to a dinner that’s serving X and that I don’t want to spend more than Y, and they’ll make some suggestions. I’ve always liked their choices, and a few times, my more oenophilic friends have even complimented the choice. So I love this place.

While most wines are organized according to geographic region, vinification method, or wine style, Best Cellars organizes their wine into eight classifications ranging from fizzy to sweet with distinctions like luscious, juicy and smooth in between. Wines are $ 15 or less which makes Best Cellars a natural stop before a dinner party or on the way home from work.
It’s easy to see why this concept works well in cities like Boston and Washington, D.C. — not sure it’d fare so well with the more wine-​educated populations of San Francisco or New York. I, for one, like to know a little more about my wine other than that it is «soft» or «big»!
That said, it’s still definitely worth a visit!