Thank you Feast and Feast Magazine Readers!!
First place for best Wine Shop in Feast Magazine!!
We are very excited that we won best wine shop in 2015 in all three of these publications! What a great year!!
- Feast Magazine
- Sauce Magazine
- Ladue News
Store - Wine Selection: The Wine & Cheese Place
The Wine & Cheese Place was voted the store with the best wine selection in St. Louis in the 2015 Feast 50. This Q&A was conducted with manager Paul Hayden.
Tell us about a few of your most popular items, and how they embody your mission. We stock over 5,000 wines, 1,200 beers and have been the leader in cheese for over 34 years now. We have always cut our cheese fresh to order, never cut in advance or pre-packaged. We carry rare cheeses that we have to pre-order six to eight weeks in advance. Along with selection, we offer great personal service and great prices. We stock many wines, spirits and beers that you do not see anywhere else.
We buy full barrels of bourbon and get it bottled for us, and then we take the fresh-dumped barrel and send it to local breweries here in town. They then create a beer and barrel-age it and release it exclusively at our stores. We have done such beers with Side Project Brewing, 2nd Shift Brewing, 4 Hands Brewing Co., Perennial Artisan Ales, Charleville Brewing Co. and Schlafly Beer, to name a few.
As far as wine, we do not just buy what is presented to us. We go out and find wines that are not in St. Louis. We find them and bring them to the market, wines you cannot find anywhere else. Our most popular white wine is called La Croix Gratiot Picpoul de Pinet. Strange name, but we found it and bring it in 56 cases at a time. We are the only place you can find this wine. It’s a fresh and delicious wine for any day.
What have been some milestones in your career so far? The Wine & Cheese Place has been around serving St. Louis since 1982, we are into our 34th year now. We have been instrumental in introducing a number of items to St. Louis before they were mainstream. We continue to find new products whether it be a new wine, beer, food product or cheese and bring them into the market. I have personally been here over 28 years and happy that we have survived so long to see how St. Louis has changed, both in retail and the quality of restaurants.
Clearly your work has resonated with shoppers – what would you attribute this to, and what does it mean to you? Customer service is number one. People can buy wine, cheese or beer anywhere and very conveniently at the grocery stores. They have to make a special trip to come see us. Offering expert service and knowledge keeps them coming back. We treat them like family and give them great advice to keep them coming back. We do not push wines on people; we are very low key and let them look, but we are there for them to help.
What do you hope to see happen next in the local food scene, and why? For retail and us, it is the bourbon-barrel-aging craze right now. I would like to see this continue as it is an amazing trend. Bourbon is so popular now, that it is extending into the food side more and more. People want everything bourbon-barrel-aged. We started with bourbon-barrel-aged beers with local breweries. This lead to more ideas. We also bourbon-barrel-age 100 percent Vermont organic maple syrup. We buy 55-gallon drums of syrup and age it in a fresh dumped bourbon barrel — it is called Sweet Sophie Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup (named after my daughter). We have done four barrels so far. There is nobody else in town aging their own syrup like this and I think there are only a few companies that make barrel-aged syrup in the country. It is a rare treat.
We then sent this barrel that had bourbon in it and then the maple syrup and then sent it to StiIL 630 to put whiskey in it., a rye whiskey that we call Maple Sunset — our second batch was just released [this month]. That barrel is now going to Side Project Brewing to have a beer in it next! Third time a beer from Side Project is aging in our maple syrup barrel. As you can see, we like to collaborate with local distilleries and breweries. It is another way to involve the whole community and make St. Louis an original place. We also did a batch of barrel-aged vanilla extract. We also carry barrel-aged soy sauce, bitters, teriyaki sauce and so on.
Whether it’s curating an extensive selection on collaborating on a product, where do you get your inspiration? What inspires you and motivates you to do the work that you do? Inspiration comes from listening and keeping an open mind. Kind of cliche, but looking at something in a different view. When we started buying our own barrels of bourbon, I thought there must be something we could do with these barrels instead of just display them. You could still smell the bourbon oozing from them (you knew it was fresh dumped). This was about six years ago before the barrel-aging craze. I was talking to Dan Kopman of Schlafly about doing a special beer for us. A few weeks later, the barrel came in and the light bulb went on. I emailed Dan and he liked the idea. I drove the barrel down that day without a plan and their head brewer said he had some of their Quadrupel in tanks and it was ready to go. A quad in a barrel sounded great and we filled it right on the spot. We let it age for awhile and released our first barrel-aged beer. Thus the program was born.
What’s next for you and your work? Not sure what is next on the horizon, as we’re waiting for the next inspiration to come. We have been working on finding more handmade products instead of large factory-produced products. We found some original soy sauce from Japan that is made in the old traditional way — aged over a year in barrels instead of the salty soy sauce you find in stores that is made in less than a week. People want to purchase products that they know the provenance. They do not want products that are mass-produced without care. We are finding those products both locally and internationally.
The Wine & Cheese Place, multiple locations including 7435 Forsyth Blvd., Clayton, Missouri, 314.727.8788,wineandcheeseplace.com
Here are just a few of our awards.
- 2015 Feast Magazine - Best Wine Selection
- 2015 Sauce Magazine - Favorite Wine Shop
- 2015 Ladue News Platinum List - Best Wine Store
- 2014 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2014 Feast Magazine People's Choice Specialty Wine, Beer and Spirits Shop
- 2013 Sauce Magazine Reader's Choice Favorite Place to buy Cheese
- 2012 Ladue News Platinum List - Best Place to Buy Wine
- 2012 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2011 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Place to Buy Cheese
- 2011 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2011 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Liquor Store
- 2010 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2010 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Place to Buy Cheese
- 2010 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Specialty Food Shop
- 2010 Ladue News Platinum List “Best Place to Buy Wine”
- 2010 Riverfront Times Readers’ Choice St. Louis' Best Cheese Counter
- 2010 Riverfront Times Readers’ Choice St. Louis' Best Liquor Store
- 2009 Riverfront Times Readers’ Choice Best Liquor Store
- 2009 Riverfront Times Readers’ Choice Best Cheese Selection
- 2009 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Cheese Shop
- 2009 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2008 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Liquor Store
- 2008 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Wine Shop
- 2008 Sauce Magazine Readers’ Choice Favorite Place to Buy Cheese
- 2008 Ladue News Best Cheese Selection
- 2008 Ladue News Platinum List Award Winner
