“That allows us a great degree of freedom to be able to go out and source our own products,” Brintnell says, sitting at a large wooden table tucked in the shop’s bottom floor, surrounded by seemingly endless shelves of wine. “I have had customers come in and say, ‘We had this wine while we were in Europe. Could you get it?’ And sometimes we would get samples sent in, and if we liked it, then we would actually end up representing them in Alberta.”
Another example: Former Oilers’ coach Craig MacTavish came into the shop looking for a California wine from J. Rochioli Vineyard & Winery. Brintnell reached out, but they had very small allocations and told him to check back the next year.
He did — multiple times, finally reaching owner Tom Rochioli who said “Oh sorry, I was up in Washington fishing.”
Brintnell, a seasoned fisherman, thought, Fishing in February? He then said, “Oh, you were steelheading?” The two spent the next half hour talking about fishing, which helped land Brintnell the wine allocation.
The business has changed drastically over 40 years – with fewer people building actual wine cellar collections and many young people forgoing alcohol altogether – but that personal connection still matters.
“For the most part, supplier relationships are very personal,” Brintnell adds. “I’m very good friends with a number of our suppliers. A lot of them are much smaller producers, often family owned. With one of my burgundy producers, my entire allocation amounts to 12 cases of four different products. That Domaine de la Romanée-Conti? We get allocated by the bottle. One year I might have one bottle, another year I might have four.”
While they might carry rare, high-end selections, they also sell at an accessible price point too.
“People walk in and see the brick, see that everything is laying down – that’s because you want the cork to stay moist – and there’s an intimidation factor for some people,” he says. “But there shouldn’t be.”
The Wine Cellar
Westmount | 12421 102 Ave NW, Edmonton | thewinecellar.ab.ca