Best Cellars

Best Cellars no more and welcome in new management and ownership! Best Cellars was fine, but their selection was very limited and they didn’t sell anything other than wine.
Well, step in new owners and management. They have another liquor store in Waltham, Glendale Package Store, so they know the business. What did they do RIGHT immediately? Bring in other options to make it a LIQUOR STORE. Now I can get my beer and hard liquor with that bottle of Cab or Pinot. Not everyone is a wine drinker so I welcome the addition!
Best of luck to the new owners and thanks for bringing in more of a selection!

Picture it: Sicily. 1932. A young girl walks to the local marketplace with ten chickens, her faithful dog, and a dream.
Wait, that’s not me. Picture it: Boston. 1999. As a neophyte to the world of upscale food service, I sought out sommelier training. I was going to take the wine world by storm, dammit!
I figured out two things very quickly:
1. Sommeliers have to suck up to rich buttholes on a daily basis. I found this aspect of the job, shall we say, intrinsically incompatible with my personality.
2. Wine tasting is highly individual; the lingo is full of lots of subjective adjectives that ultimately depend more on the person than the wine. I’ve proved this by a simple experiment: I once sold the same bottle at two different tables by giving it two different descriptions. One was «dry, apple-​y with citrus tones and a hint of wood» and the other was «A robust white with an acidic nose, undertones of gravel and slate, with a long finish». It doesn’t mean anything, man! They’re just words. But these people totally agreed with me upon tasting it: «Oh! I can taste the apple!»
Enter Best Cellars. I can accept that they are trying to make things easier for people. Obviously there’s a huge difference between a Cabernet and a Zinfandel. But when push comes to shove, wine appreciation comes down to tasting lots of wine over a period of time and determining what you like. For me to walk in to a store and assume that the «Dry» or «Juicy» label on a wall will find me the perfect bottle… well, it doesn’t make sense to me.
The wines that I’ve tried/​tasted here have been of overall standard to poor quality. I look on the walls and I don’t see anything I like. Who cares if it’s cheap? I’d rather go to Blanchards and pay more money for a tried-​and-​true bottle that I know I’ll like than try to crap shoot with some substandard varietal from Brindell’s Winey-​yards, Hoboken, NJ, vintage 2008 (last week, actually).
Reading over this, I am fully ready to admit that I’m a wine snob, but I hope you can see my point. Don’t let someone else make the determination for you. Try wines on your own and make your own informed choices!