Westport’s Liquor Locker has a new owner — wine maven Cory D’Addario. Ms. D’Addario recently purchased this almost 50 year old institution from Harvey Skolnick. He and Pat and Lou will continue offering their knowledgeable support to customers, while his nephew, Seth Sholes, will remain a partner.
Cory is a Culinary Institute of America trained chef who has been active in the wine business for over 20 years. When you come in you’ll be greeted like an old friend. And when you ask for something, her first question is “what’s your menu?”
Her real expertise is matching wines to your meal, helping the hostess (or host) make that dinner party a success, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert — along with, perhaps, a bit of menu guidance.
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Her preferences run to the beautiful, though not often well known labels, ones that are “sustainable, organic, biodynamic, and fair trade,” wines from smaller vineyards — “artisanals” rather than better known mass produced brands.
Here’s what that mouthful means. The grapes are grown and wines produced using ecologically sound, economically viable and socially responsible practices, without pesticides or synthetic additives.
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These wines are more carefully made and offer a richer, clearer, more vibrant and balanced “mouth feel” than many of the well known brands.
Fair trade means treating workers with respect, paying them appropriately, and not taking advantage of them.
Add in “terroir,” a favorite Cory word. Wines are products of the soil in which the grapes are grown. Often smaller vineyards near those supplying well known labels yield grapes of equal quality, yet their wines sell for less because the wineries are smaller, and they lack professional marketing. These are the stock-in-trade of Liquor Locker.
Important also is that a wine “outperform its price,” so the wine drinker, whether novice bottle at a time buyer or veteran collector, will find something to enjoy at Liquor Locker, from the $10 sit on the back porch and enjoy the summer wine to the exquisite $2,500 case still three years away.
Liquor Locker will soon have a new website, and will host educational programs and tastings beginning in the Fall. So stop by, 411 Post Road East, in the Compo Shopping Center.
