Around 1989, former Edmonton Oilers’ owner Peter Pocklington was looking for a bottle of wine from an estate in Burgundy, France, called Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. It was for a guest: famed operatic tenor Luciano Pavorotti. He turned to The Wine Cellar, a relatively new High Street shop. Then-owner Hank Gillespie was able to procure a small allocation.
“From then on, we were representing Domaine here in Alberta,” says Wade Brintnell, who took over the shop from Gillespie. “We’ve carried it every year since.”
This November, The Wine Cellar marked its 40th anniversary with a small celebration where regular customers, employees and other revellers tasted 40 different wines. For Brintnell, who started working there as a stockboy in ‘89 and bought the store outright in 2002, those four decades have been filled with interesting stories, plenty of travel to scout new wines and changes to the industry.
The large brick store has become a mainstay of High Street. With sommeliers on staff and Gillespie himself equipped with encyclopedic knowledge of wine, long-time customers have continued to pop in for special occasions, to grow their wine collection and for a wine club that’s been running since 1993.
But the store’s longevity ultimately boils down to one prudent business decision: When it opened in 1985, The Wine Cellar was granted a direct source license, allowing Gillespie to source his own products and distribute to restaurants and other stores, making it the first private wine store of its kind in the province, possibly the country.
Then, in 1993, when Alberta moved to privatize the industry, the few business owners with this license were expected to convert to a new license that would require them to select stock from a set range of products. Instead, Gillespie met with the chairman of the liquor commission and negotiated a deal in which he retained his original license – which he still has to this day. (As far as Brintnell knows, they are one of three stores in the province with the license.)
“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
