North End Wine and Liquor Store

The Wine shop that i went to was North End and Wine and Liquor is located on 2509 Webster Ave Bronx N.Y. 10458. When you get off on Fordham Road you can see it easily and won’t miss it because the name of the store is in really big letters. When one stands in front of the store it looks like the inside is pretty big, but as always looks can be very deceiving. I am not sure if it was because they had just received an order but the day that I went in the store you were surrounded in a tight space of boxes. The atmosphere wasn’t really of a wine store but more of a bodega. The store sells both wine and liquor it was hard to go straight to the designated are for the wine but after a couple of looks around you could spot the wines.
The way that the wines were setup was by regions and grape varieties. The biggest section of the wines was for Italy and California. However the only regions and grape variety that were highlighted were Argentina, Italy, California, Chile, and Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir. I was looking for French and German wines but there weren’t any sections for them, they were just scattered around the store. This is interesting because why would you have them around the store and not in a designated area. I was also surprised that I didn’t see a section for kosher wines; they lose a lot of customers by not supplying kosher wines. Recommendation that I would make when it comes to this section would be to make a section for Germany & France next to the other wine racks, and also to provide a variety of Kosher wines.
Another place where they store their wines is in a refrigerator that had 8 doors. They held the wines and some liquor at very cold temperatures. In this refrigerator you could see champagne and chardonnay, meaning that they sold these two wines either cold or at room temperature. What I noticed most about the bottles in the refrigerator was the way they were stored. They weren’t on a slant with the label up; the wines were standing straight up or on a wire rack.
When it comes to inquiring information about the wines wasn’t hard. All the wine had their own price tag and if you were looking for the good expensive wine they were locked away in a cabinet. Prices varied from $10 -$600, and from previous comments made from friends if you are ordering a large number of wine you can negotiate a good price. As far as sales go you can find them online, and in the store the sales associates can help you.
When it comes to the sales assistants it’s kind of like a heads or tails game heads they’ll treat you good tails they’ll be rude. When I walked into the store the lady behind the cash register smiled and welcomed me into the store, and the first associate that I asked for help to show me where the wines were smiled and easily helped me, even told me the way the wines was set up and that if I wasn’t sure of what I wanted and was looking for specific characteristics in a wine that he would be happy to help me. He seemed like he at least had a little bit of wine knowledge, but the second associate that I asked for help was kind of rude, he just told me he was busy that he would get someone else to help me and he never came back, or actually sent someone to help me.
Asides from the recommendations mentioned in the beginning another recommendation that I would give this store is to hire people with more wine knowledge. Unless you study wine it’s hard to pick a wine to match to a specific event or food, but if you have assistants in the store that can help with such matter then visiting the wine store won’t be so hard. I also think that if the assistants had more knowledge of the products they were selling they would be happier to help the customers instead of brushing them off. I would come back to this wine store if I was in the area and needed to like the first time I walked in, but I wouldn’t recommend a highly professional or a person who needs help in picking wines to come to the store. Next time I visit a wine store I will go the one that I usually go to, I don’t want to say that’s what I get for trying something new but I feel like in this case I would say so!.