Brassy jazz standards. Busy cash registers. The crinkle of bottles being wrapped in brown paper bags. Walk in the front door of Red Spirits & Wine in Bellevue, and you’re immediately hit with the holiday rush.
This is the busy season for liquor retailers. Open houses, Christmas gifts, family visiting from out of town — they’re all reasons to stock up on booze.
But the shelves in many Tennessee liquor stores don’t just contain alcohol these days.
“A lot of it’s gift-oriented items,” says Red Spirits manager Eric Nichols. “Some really nice recipe books, cookbooks … The Wine Bible, things like that.”
Grocery stores in Tennessee have been counting down to July 1, the day they’ll finally be able to sell wine. Meanwhile, liquor retailers have been hard at work figuring out how to cope with the increased competition.
Red Spirits has been experimenting over the past 18 months with everything from limes and lemons to two hundred dollar decanters. Nichols says the store’s approach has been primarily trial and error.
It’s all new stuff. For decades, liquor stores operated in a world apart. Grocery stores could sell beer, but nothing harder. Liquor stores sold wine and spirits. Nothing else. Not even a corkscrew.
Tennessee is finally changing all of that. (continue reading)