Other retailers may be hurting after a disappointing Christmas season, but managers of liquor stores say customers appear to be spending as much as last year.
Today, they expect long lines of folks ready to buy champagne to bring in the new year.
At the Wine Reserve, a state liqour store on 18th Street off Rittenhouse Square, manager Gerard Haney said his Christmas sales were above last year's.
Today, which is New Year's Eve, he said, "we expect . . . to be deluged."
He expects a crowd even though at the Wine Reserve, "Most of my champagnes are pricey."
"My store carries champagnes that just about none of the other state stores carry," Haney said.
He's already sold out of his most reasonably priced sparkling wine. That was an Australian Seaview that sold for $9 a bottle. The lowest priced champagne in stock is a Saint Hilare that goes for $10.79.
If you have a lot of money to spend, you can splurge for a bottle of Roederer Cristal, that goes for $151.59 for a rose and only $129 for a brut.
(Technically, only sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France can be called champagne. But some of the California sparkling wines are called champagne. They are fermented in the same way as the wines of France.)
"There's a champagne out there for every pocketbook," says Shelly Margolis, president of Margolis Wine & Spirits. His company supplies Korbel sparkling wine to state liquor stores.
At the state store at 7th and South streets, manager Anthony Jones said he has already sold out of his least expensive champagne: J. Roget, a New York- produced sparkling wine that sells for $3.79 a bottle.
"It's the cheapest you can buy," Jones said. When asked if it is any good, Jones laughed and said, "It's a matter of opinion. Quite a few restaurants say it's 'better than Andre.' "
Jones said he was pretty swamped with customers yesterday and the most popular brands being purchased were Andre ($3.99), Korbel ($10.99) and Freixenet ($8.49).
But if you were to ask Jones for his recommendation, he'd suggest Domaine Ste. Michelle, a wine from Washington state that sells for $7.99 a bottle.
Personally, Jones said he thinks both Korbel (a California wine) and Freixenet (from Spain and pronounced fresh-uh-NET) "are overrated."
But Freixenet, the largest Spanish exporter of sparkling wines, expects to have sold more sparkling wine in the United States this year than all brands of French champagne combined. That's 20 million bottles to the French's 14 million bottles.
