Cellar Rat owner Ryan Sciara recently started offering customers the option of enjoying glasses and bottles of wine inside his store. While that might not seem like a big step, it took a year for Sciara to legalize the deal, which included getting a new ordinance passed by the Kansas City Council so he could sell wine by the glass.
The city essentially has two types of liquor licenses -- a retail license for liquor, convenience and grocery stores, and a by-the-drink license for restaurants and bars. Retail stores are allowed to give away wine as long as they don't charge for it, thus free tastings. Cellar Rat needed a by-the-drink license to sell wine for drinking in the store. But the city told told Sciara no way. "The state of Missouri had no problems with it but when the city came in, they took a look around and said it looks like a retail store, that they wouldn't give me the license," he says.
That's when Sciara got creative.
Working with his lawyers and the city's Regulated industries Division, Sciara finally got an ordnance passed for a new type of liquor license called "specialty-by-the-drink."
"It took a really long time to get it worked out because they [Regulated Industries] wanted to make sure all the loopholes were closed, so that, say, a regular liquor store couldn't apply for the license and let people start drinking pints and 40s in the store," Sciara explains. "At the same time, they didn't want to pass a new ordnance so specific it would only apply to one business.... The deal was close to being done a couple times only to have the Regulated Industries pull out and we had start from square one."
In the final wording of the ordnance, the specialty-by-the-glass license only applies to wine and by-the-glass sales can only be a small percentage of the store's overall business. That's fine with Sciara, who had been interested in selling glasses of wine since opening the
store: "We planned this tasting room and even built it into our lease that
we could serve wine."
Sciara isn't doing anything drastic with the new license. The biggest change is two tables set up in the corner where people can sit down and order wine by the glass and food such as pate, olives, proscuitto from La Quercia Farm and twelve varieties of cheeses. Prices range from $6 to $18.
From a consumer's point of view, the best part of having retail stores such as Cellar Rat sell wine-by-the-glass is that mark-up is much lower than at restaurants. "I can't charge eight or nine bucks for a glass when the customer can see it only costs $11 for a whole bottle," Sciara notes. "I'm not trying to makes lots of money on these glasses. The hope is to get people wine they like and then buy a bottle of it."
Meanwhile he's still hosting classes, like the one on wine essentials tonight at
5:30 p.m. and the sensory evaluation class next Friday. Check the list of scheduled events on Cellar Rat's Web site.
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This is an interesting story, but the use of the word "ordnance" was driving me buggy! So I looked it up to make sure I wasn't crazy.
I'm not. You should check it out, too. ;)
Back to the story, when Leo and I were on vacation in CA in February, we stopped through Carlsbad to have pizza and beer with friends of ours that live there. We met up at this restaurant that was a brewery as well, and had a beer shop immediately next door. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen...it was around 20'x20', and they had beers from all over the damned place...even Boulevard! And you could open the beers there and just hang out and chat with the owners/employees about it. I guess you can try any beer they have for, like, a buck, if you don't want to buy a whole bottle/6-pack. It was an awesome idea. The pizza place is called Pizza Port Brewing Company, and the little shop is immediately next to it. Kind of a hippie-ish place, but definitely a fun find! I wish we had places like that here...
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