When you see new wine labels appearing on the shelves of your favorite ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, what you may not know is that they first have to go through the process of being taste tested by ABC's wine team. This is how we decide what wines we will carry…or not. The team is comprised of the ABC buying group, the wine marketing team and lastly the wine supervisors. Each month a hundred or so wines that have been submitted by any number of wholesalers are lined up to be tasted, evaluated and looked at to see if they fill a need. Ultimately a decision is made on its viability to be part of our portfolio.

Better get to work Bill Stobbs!

Sitting in a room filled with wine and tasting (spitting) through them all may sound like an easy and fun day at the office, but it is far from a happy hour experience. We carry thousands of wines and not all of them are flying out the door, so before we add we must also subtract. Decisions on what we already have must be made before we decide on what we may want to bring into the stores as new items.

Wine supervisors Atanas Nechkov, Shayne Hebert and Paul Quaglini are looking a little tired of tasting wines, don't you think?

Many wine producers would like to get their product into our warehouse, so we have far more wines to taste than those we will eventually decide to bring into the stores. We have to decide on wines we think our guests would like to take home, and that is not always the same as the wines we may like to drink. The great thing about our team is that we have a very broad taste in wines, so we pretty much cover all the bases. Though it does make for a long day, it really helps ensure the wines our guests find on our shelves are of good quality and good value.

So the next time you pick out a new wine from your favorite ABC, you now know what goes into getting these fine wines into your favorite wine glass.

Enjoy!

Ken Amendola, ABC Fine Wine & Spirits wine supervisor

Follow me on Twitter @abcwinekena