Our Name for It
We needed a different word for what we built.
Liquor store was not right. Neither was tasting room, bottle shop, or anything else that already existed. So we made one up, and then we had to earn it.
The Usual Way
The problem with how bottles are usually sold
Here is the situation every one of us has been in. You are standing in front of a wall of bottles, most of which you have never tried, trying to decide which one to spend fifty dollars on.
You have three things to go on: the price, the label, and whatever you have heard. None of them tell you whether you will like what is inside.
So you guess. Sometimes you guess well. More often the bottle ends up three quarters full at the back of a cabinet, quietly avoided, while you go back to buying the same thing you always bought.
That is not a failure of taste. It is a failure of the way the transaction is set up. You are asked to commit before you know.
Before We Opened
What we learned before we opened
It started with a question our son Will asked when he turned twenty one. He wanted to know what he would actually enjoy, and none of us could tell him.
So we set out to find out. About a year and roughly five thousand dollars later, buying at big-box stores and working through it bottle by bottle, we had our answer, and it was not the one we expected.
Price did not predict it. Reputation did not predict it. Bottles from the bottom shelf turned out to be some of the best things we tried. Bottles displayed up top at three times the cost were often a letdown. Not bad, just not worth it, to us.
The only thing that reliably predicted whether we would like something was tasting it.
How It Works
So that truth is what the shop is built around
Any bottle on our main floor is four dollars to taste. Not a marketing sample. Ten milliliters, about a third of an ounce, served in a one ounce glass, which is enough to nose it, sip it, and sit with it.
Anything at two hundred fifty dollars or less at retail is out on the floor and covered by that four dollars. Bottles above that are kept separately and priced individually, usually five to twenty dollars depending on what it is. We tell you the price before you taste it.
A few things are not available for tasting: a small number of very limited high-dollar releases, and the wine.
Four tastes runs you sixteen dollars. One bottle you get wrong costs three times that.
The Other Half
But tasting is only half of it
Plenty of places will pour you something. What actually makes this different is what happens around the pour.
We are not the authority. You are.
Nobody behind this counter is going to tell you that you are wrong for liking something. If the twenty six dollar bottle beats the sixty dollar bottle for you, buy the twenty six dollar one. That happens constantly and it is a good outcome, not a missed sale.
We stock the overlooked on purpose.
The bottles nobody advertises, the distilleries putting everything into what is in the glass and nothing into the billboard, the categories other shops give three feet of shelf and we give sixteen. That only works if you can taste your way into them, which is the whole point.
There is no lecture.
Ask any question you want. Nobody here is keeping score, and nobody is going to make you feel like you should have known.
There is no rush.
People walk in expecting ten minutes and stay closer to forty five. That is not a problem we are trying to solve.
Setting Expectations
What it is not
It is not a bar. There is no tab, no seat for the evening, no cocktail menu. The pour exists so you can decide about the bottle, not so you can spend the night.
It is not a free sample counter either. We charge four dollars because a real taste of a real bottle has real cost, and being straightforward about that is better than burying it in the shelf price.
And we do not sell online. If you want a bottle from us, come see us. That is not a limitation we are working around. It is the point.
The Word
So, a spiritorium
We tried on the existing words and none of them fit.
Liquor store says a place you go to buy a known quantity, fast. Tasting room usually means one producer pouring their own. Bottle shop is closer but it leaves out everything that happens at the counter.
We wanted something that carried both halves at once: a room full of spirits worth exploring, and a place where you find out what you like before you commit. Emporium was the shape of it. Spiritorium was the word. It is invented and we know it, but it is the only one that describes what actually happens here.
If you have not been in yet: come find out what you like. The first taste is four dollars and there is no wrong answer.
Come see what the word means.
Four dollars a taste, any bottle on the floor. Tell us what you have liked before and we will pour from there.