Kyle Nabilcy
It’s hard out there for a little bottle shop.
Madison’s bottle shop ecosystem is diverse and competitive. Perhaps as a result of being both a college town and a craft beer town, there’s a market for the cheapest possible 36-pack of American adjunct lager cans and a $20 four-pack of bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout. It seems to me, though, that a shop has to be able to move both in order to profit and thrive.
Take Alpine Liquors. At the corner of Cottage Grove and Sprecher roads, it’s the shop closest to my neighborhood, and a pretty solid one at that. It was just bought by Chuck Coens (owner of two Harley’s locations), who hopes to reopen the shop May 6 as City View Liquor if all goes as planned.
“We are on the May 3 ALRC docket,” Coens says.
It won’t be another Harley’s because this is the first location Coens will own with a partner, Anthony DeMarte. He also plans on continuing a beer club program for regular customers, as Alpine Liquors did there (and still does, at its Oregon, Wis., location).
It doesn’t sound like engagement with regulars was a problem for Alpine at the Cottage Grove Road location. Coens says the beer club had more than a thousand members. But the new Metro Market in Grandview Commons that opened in 2014 had an impact.
Kyle Nabilcy
Alpine owner Ted Wallace is going to turn his attention to improving his Oregon store — he’s looking forward to having more time and resources to make that happen now. This will include implementing a new point-of-sale system that’ll save him money, and carrying more beer and better wine. And when the time is right, he says, he has plans for another new location.
The move to keep the Oregon store over the Madison store makes sense. Wallace wants to get the Oregon market hip to the craft beer scene the way Madison is. Madison’s beer retail market is crowded. (I’ll talk more about some of my other favorite shops in a future column.) In Oregon, Alpine Liquors is far and away the biggest fish in a little pond.
Small, specialty shops are continuing to figure out ways to appeal to their market, tinkering with variables like size and visibility and location. Like I said, it's hard out there for a little bottle shop.
