Gastro-Economic Indicator II

I just learned that one of my favorite sources of food and drink, Bello Vino Marketplace, will be going out of business just after New Years'. I suspect it's another victim of the economic downturn, and I will admit to having a hand in its demise. Against a backdrop of banks failing and automakers imploding, Bello's closure may not be of much consequence. In my little world, though, it is. Over the years the store, in its various forms, helped give that world some of its more pleasing contours.

When my wife and I moved to Ann Arbor at the end of 1999, we were occasional wine drinkers. We enjoyed the odd bottle of California Hearty Burgundy with spaghetti, or married our pot roast to a genuine vintage cabernet or merlot produced somewhere in the former Soviet bloc. We were taking an interest in microbrews, having lived not far from the Michigan Brewing Company, but had only the slightest idea of the variety of those that were out there.

That changed when we discovered a Merchant of Vino in a nearby strip mall. Merchant of Vino was a small chain of gourmet specialty shops around suburban Detroit, though the one by us was aligned with the Whole Foods chain. We checked it out one weekend and were impressed by their selection of craft beers. We sampled that selection regularly, and also began venturing into those daunting wine racks that consumed four aisles of the store. We began buying a few better wines that we'd heard of before--French Rhones, some of the less pricey California Zinfandels and Merlots, Riojas, Chiantis, Australian Shiraz.... The staff were only too glad to recommend wines, and their recommendations usually were gems. They were always enjoyable to deal with, never betraying snobbishness or hauteur. No question was too dumb, no mangled pronunciation of a French or Italian name brought a smirk. The beer people (yes, they had dedicated staffs for each) were also quite friendly and extremely well informed. They sounded intimately familiar with every brew they sold, and their characterization of every one I bought from them proved dead on.

So for the next couple of years we drank pretty well, usually enjoying a good bottle of wine or two and a couple sixes of some premium beer every weekend. I hate to think of what we spent on it, but at the time we could afford it, not having car payments and not having launched major home improvement projects. And we could always justify what we did spend by observing that we could have spent a lot more: when some of Merchant of Vino's bottles of wine cost hundreds, a $9 Montepulciano D' Abbruzo felt like a bargain we could hardly pass up.

Merchant (as we called it) was, as I mentioned, run by Whole Foods, and when Whole opened a massive new store down on Washtenaw Avenue in 2004, they closed Merchant. But within a few months, someone opened up a near-duplicate of it in the same space. They called it "Bello Vino."

The party was back on, but over the years we attended less and less. Our neighborhood grocery improved its beer and wine selection; why drive another mile if I didn't have to? Plus, as other expenses appeared, we spent less on beverages. Even so, we usually got to Bello at least once a month, and when we wanted to buy a really good wine, or try something new, it was the store of choice.

Over the past year, with our finances getting tighter still, I doubt we'd been in there ten times. I stopped in last Saturday to grab one of their readymade sandwiches for lunch and saw the "Going out of Business!" signs. It's sad, but really not surprising. With people worried losing their jobs and their retirement savings, luxuries will be the first thing to go, and Bello offered little else.

Until they close on the 15th, they are offering some generous discounts on their remaining stock, so I shall have to investigate their rhone selection, and perhaps sample some of those quirkily labled Belgian or English strong ales lurking along the wall between the wine racks and the beer coolers. This new years', in a melancholy respect, I will indeed party like it's 1999.