Anyone have any experience buying from them? Please share. Thanks.
Would actually be interested in hearing about this as well – I’ve been trying to find some good wine stores in brooklyn so I don’t have to schlep into manhattan (or deal with shipping) when I’m looking to just pick up a few bottles
I used to purchase quite a bit from the former owner Fifi at Passage de la Fleur, Greg the new owner is a straight up guy and has a great selection of biodynamic geek wines and others. I am a customer.
Shop with confidence
There are quite a few good stores in Brooklyn these days. Where are you?
I’m just below Windsor Terrace – and I will say that as far as selection goes, Best Buy Liquors down by Coney Island is the clear winner. That being said, I haven’t been in the area all that long and definitely have not seen all brooklyn has to offer – if you have any recommendations, especially for more quality-over-quantity shops, that would certainly be appreciated!
Gowanus Wine Merchants is not too far from you. I know one of the owners, Tom Hyland. He’s a good guy. I haven’t actually been there. After all, it’s in . . . Brooklyn. 
Jason - Sold my house on Sherman St in Windsor Terrace two years ago and can’t believe how much I miss it. Windsor Wines/Slope Cellars/Krupa Bistro are all owned by Patty and John. I’ve known them since before they opened the first store and as they’ve grown in the business they’ve become really good at picking and sourcing decent wines. Well-deserved success story. Can’t offer deep discounts, but they do have a decent selection. One’s on Seventh Av and the other is on PPW just south of the Park.
Up Fifth Ave near Atlantic is a small place called Sip - the owner, Nick, used to buy a lot of wine from me. Those are close by. There’s another place, the Juice Box, on Prospect Ave near Ocean Pkwy, and they’re affiliated with another store in Midwood but it’s different. The woman’s husband worked for one of the big distributors and to make his sales each month they had to load up on whatever he has to push. At least that’s how they used to buy so they had all the Lauber stuff and little else. It may be different now - I haven’t been there for years.
Off Atlantic in Bkn Hts is Heights Chateau. A few friends bought a little place in Dumbo called Blanc et Rouge, and also opened Uva in Williamsburg. They teamed up with someone else to open Flatiron, which now has a San Francisco branch, run buy the guy who used to manage Uva. All worth checking out.
Completely different in outlook and everything else, but offering good prices, especially on liquor, is BQE Liquor. It’s in Williamsburg off the BQE and it may not seem like a wine geek shop, but talk to Teddy, the owner, or Michael, and it’s actually a nice little place. They discount the more you buy, so prices are decent, and they have a huge warehouse nearby, so can purchase higher volumes than many other stores.
Thank you all for the info.
Greg knows better since he lived out there. I would add that Heights Chateau usually has some interesting stuff that’s not on display on the main floor.
Also, Prospect Wine on 7th Ave. near 9th St. has a very interesting selection. You can tell someone there really cares and picks each wine. There are a lot of offbeat things there – in a very good way.
I haven’t been in Uva for a while, but they had a fascinating selection.
I used to live half a block down from Prospect Wine. The original owner was a crazy lady. I thought she bought her inventory for drinking herself. She used to scream at the two guys who worked for her kind of like the lady at Ralph’s on Chambers if you remember that store.
Anyway, I went in there one day and saw a 1996 Cantemerle. “How much?” I asked one of the guys, since it was in the $15 bin.
“Oh, that’s fifteen,” he replied.
I went up to the front with it and she looked it over and said “This is forty five dollars.”
“But it was in the fifteen dollar bin,” I protested.
“Oh hell no,” she replied. “This is a hot m’dock!”
Then she called the guy over and started cursing him out for putting a hot m’dock into the fifteen dollar bin.
The current owner however, is crazy.
I’ve only bought from Vanderbilt once, but it went well. I found their website a bit confusing, but they were very responsive and overall customer service was excellent.
? Both the former and the current owner?
OK, I’ll bite, how hot was it?
I don’t know Ben but she was too cheap to have AC so that wine sat through a few hot sticky summers in Brooklyn. The AC was the open door.
And when I say she cursed out the help - she dropped F bombs like a hailstorm.
But it’s not like you would go into that spider-web filled dusty store for a hot m’dock anyway. It was where the real winos went.
John - yeah. Different issues.