Eureka, a wine rush!

IT’S an automat for wine lovers, albeit one that requires lots of quarters. At Vinum Populi in Culver City, tastes of 48 wines are for sale from “Enomatic” vending machines. With your glass under one of the spouts, you insert a prepaid debit card, punch a button and you’ve served yourself at the wine bar. An ounce of 2002 Tua Rita Redigaffi: $15.24. Owner Miguel Garza hopes that that thimbleful of wine will convince you to buy a bottle of the Tuscan merlot for $351.92.

The gimmick just might work. Because in wine-thirsty Los Angeles, everything works these days. Wine bars are selling bottles. Wine shops are adding wine bars; chefs are opening wine stores. New fine wine stores are opening all over town, and established shops are expanding.

The new guys are selling more than wine -- they’re selling a wine lifestyle. Plans for a downtown wine store-wine bar envisioned by “Top Chef” contestant Stephen Asprinio include museum-style audio wands that deliver recorded spiels about each individual wine that customers can access while they are sipping and shopping.

In six weeks, five Enomatic machines costing a total of $40,000 will arrive at the Wine House to outfit a new self-service tasting room in the center of the West Los Angeles store. “You have to create a social environment,” says Jim Knight, whose father founded the store 29 years ago. “We’re the biggest store in Southern California. We need to create foot traffic, get people into the store.” The new wine drinkers aren’t signing up for wine classes, Knight says. They like the idea of self-service.

A Manhattan Beach entrepreneur has launched Wine Styles, a new chain of franchised wine stores with party rooms tricked out with such flourishes as the red organza “love tent” in the chain’s Pacific Palisades store. Store owner Thierry Pierre Oliva says the tent creates a supernatural vibe for the fortune tellers he hires to work during wine tastings -- a perfect accompaniment for “spiritual” wines. The bordello red velvet couches and dim lighting, however, scream unbridled hedonism.

It’s not all silliness. Mark Peel, chef-owner of Campanile, plans to open a wine store-takeout restaurant/wine bar on La Brea near Melrose this summer. His niche: stocking perhaps 1,000 labels of moderately priced wine -- $10 to $25 -- to take home with the Campanile food available at the takeout counter. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” Peel says. “I’m really happy with things at Campanile. So we’re doing it now.”

Perhaps most significantly, for the first time, a fine wine retailer based outside the region has expanded into the Los Angeles market. K&L; Wine Merchants from San Francisco is opening an 8,700-square-foot store this week in Hollywood that will dwarf most of Southern California’s fine wine outlets.

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We love our vino

BY any estimate, Southern California leads the country in wine consumption; it is the most populous region in a state that consumed 46 million cases of wine in 2005, more than any other state and twice as much as New York, according to statistics compiled by Impact, a beverage industry trade publication. That translates into rising wine store sales. At Liquorama in Upland, owner John Solomon says, “Our average sales have gone up 30% in the last five years. And I think that’s common among retailers.”

But people such as Jennifer Nugent, 38, and her husband, John, 33, weren’t happy with the wine stores. When they turned their avocation into a profession and opened Colorado Wine Company in Eagle Rock two years ago, they designed a 1960s-style wine bar that reminded them of the basement rec rooms they grew up in -- modern sofas, Scandian-style wooden tables and a sleek wooden bar decorated with upholstered insets. “We found a surprising gap in the market for the kind of store where we wanted to shop, a place where no one is ever made to feel stupid,” Jennifer Nugent says.

A Los Angeles Times telephone survey of 61 specialty wine stores in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties shows there has been recent, explosive growth in wine retail outlets. Of the stores queried, 14 opened in the last three years and 11 stores expanded. More than half of the stores serve wine to customers while they shop, representing twice as many in-store wine bars as existed three years ago.

The survey did not count the proliferation of Beverages & More warehouse-style stores -- 17 outlets in this region with nine more to open this year -- or wine departments in grocery stores such as Trader Joe’s or retailers such as Target and Costco.

“In California, everyone can sell wine,” says Steve Zanotti, co-owner of Wine Exchange in Orange. “It’s the most competitive market in the country.”

The increase in specialty wine retail outlets in the Los Angeles area is a reflection of ongoing growth in high-end wine sales across the nation, says Jon Fredrikson, a wine industry analyst. In 2005, the value of French wine imports to the U.S. increased by $200 million, or 19%, without a dramatic increase in volume. “The dollar value of Bordeaux imports alone increased 59%,” Fredrikson says.

But, across all price categories, wine sales are up, he says. “Wine is becoming a part of mainstream American life.”

Unlike the restaurant business, with its notoriously high first-year failure rate of more than 50%, specialty wine stores are sure bets. In the Los Angeles area, a wine market full of family-owned stores, most places have been in operation for decades and failure is rare. (One chain -- Liquor Barn -- went out of business. And another chain, Vendome, downsized from more than 50 stores to the four surviving Vendome stores now operated by John Tran and his family.)

That stability appeals to K&L; Wine, says Brian Zucker, a K&L; vice president and son of one of the two founders. The company first considered opening an L.A. store in 2000 when online sales from customers in the Los Angeles area suddenly surged, increasing 350% in a year and a half. “Los Angeles is an enormous, sophisticated wine market. We didn’t find anyone going out of business here,” Zucker says. Of the 3,000 wines K&L; will stock, two-thirds are priced more than $20 per bottle.

Opening here was easier said than done, however. It took a year longer than anyone expected to renovate the building in Hollywood and secure permits for wine sales and a wine bar, Zucker says. K&L; had to pay top dollar -- $50,000 to $70,000 annual salaries with the possibility of wine-buying trips to Europe -- to hire seasoned sales staff capable of attracting serious wine buyers. The store is set to open Saturday.

In three years on Glendale Boulevard, Silverlake Wine has become renowned for offering the personalized service K&L; hopes to emulate.

“We knew we needed to expand after the first year and a half,” says George Cossette, one of Silverlake Wine’s owners. There are plans to double the shop’s 1,000-square-foot space, and they are considering opening a second store in downtown Los Angeles. “We’ll keep expanding,” Cossette says.

“The advantage of a neighborhood store is that 80% of our customers are regulars,” says Randy Clement, Cossette’s partner. “We have a lot of younger customers and a lot of women. They aren’t afraid of wine any more.” Customers don’t just buy a bottle and leave. They hang out at the wine bar. Silverlake Wine’s tastings feel more like neighborhood parties than class sessions.

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Know the market

CREATING a hip, frenetic bar that also sells wine by the bottle was Fred Hakim’s new twist on wine retail when he opened Bottle Rock in Culver City last fall. The gimmick is if you order two glasses, they’ll open any of the 600 bottles offered for sale.

The concept has worked well enough that Hakim plans to open a second Bottle Rock in downtown L.A. near Staples Center in the fall. Two additional Bottle Rocks should open before the end of the year and five more in 2008, all in Southern California. “We’ll push out around the country from there,” says Hakim, who also owns Fireside Cellars in Santa Monica.

“Customers at Fireside are established people who know what they want,” Hakim says. “At Bottle Rock, it’s the 30- to 45-year-olds.”

The same new wine drinkers are the target market for Wine Styles, the franchise chain launched by Brigitte Baker, a self-described wine neophyte. After listening to her Manhattan Beach neighbors complain about their wine anxiety, she created a store where categories such as “crisp,” “rich,” “bold” and “mellow” replace traditional varietal and regional categories. In three years, 102 Wine Styles launched around the country, with shops in Pacific Palisades, Costa Mesa, Torrance, Thousand Oaks and Irvine.

Oliva opened his Pacific Palisades Wine Styles four weeks ago. “Our wines are not serious,” he says, offering a taste of Luscious Lips, a $14.99 wine with residual sugar levels more typical of soda pop. Wine is a lifestyle, says Oliva.

As a franchisee, he gets the faux stone display cases designed specifically for the chain and can select the 140 wines he stocks from a master list with thousands of wines purchased by the Wine Styles headquarters’ staff. Equal floor space is dedicated to an array of wine-related gifts including board games and wine carryalls as well as accessories like beverage napkins and decanters.

Sprucing up the store to bring in new wine drinkers and to keep regulars in the store longer is only part of surviving in this new, more competitive wine market, says Wine House’s Knight. He’s one of several established retailers who is worried that Los Angeles’ wine stores have expanded too much, too quickly.

“I don’t think the pie is getting that much bigger,” he says. “K&L; is going to take a piece of the business from others.” The best defense: Beef up the wine selection your store offers on the Internet, say Knight and other local retailers.

“The Internet works while you are asleep,” says Chris Meeske, who opened Mission Wines in South Pasadena three years ago. “As a boutique wine shop, it allows people who otherwise would never find you to shop in your store.”

Around-the-clock sales have changed the pace of wine retail, says Diana Hirst, general manager of her family’s Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa. “Things that used to take three or four months to sell in the store are gone in three days after we send e-mails advertising them for sale online.”

And the transparency of the Internet, the ability to compare wine prices around the world, is a boon for consumers. Price competition is fierce.

“Before we buy a wine from a distributor, we look it up on the Internet,” says Jeff Kavin, son of the founder of Greenblatt’s in Hollywood. “If the going price is lower than where we can sell it, we pass on it unless the wholesaler gives us a better price. There is so much wine out there, the high prices aren’t going to hold.”

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corie.brown@latimes.com

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The new breed of wine stores

Following are a selection of specialty retailers that have opened in the last three years in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties:

Amazing Grapes, 29911 Aventura, Rancho Santa Margarita, (949) 888-9463; amazinggrapeswinestore.com

Bottle Rock, 3847 Main St., Culver City, (310) 836-9463; bottlerock.net

Colorado Wine Co., 2114 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 478-1985; cowineco.com

K&L; Wine Merchants, 1400 Vine St., Los Angeles, (323) 464-9463; klwines.com

Mission Wines, 1114 Mission St., South Pasadena, (626) 403-9463; missionwines.com

Moe’s Fine Wines, 11740 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 826-4444; moesfinewines.com

Silverlake Wine, 2395 Glendale Blvd.,Los Angeles, (323) 662-9024; silverlakewine.com

Vinum Populi, 3865 Cardiff Ave., Culver City, (310) 204-5645

Wine Hotel, 5800 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (323) 937-9463; thewinehotel.com

Wine Styles: 2646 Dupont Drive, Irvine, (949) 474-7393; 970 Monument St., Los Angeles, (310) 454-6860; 193 N. Moorpark Road, Thousand Oaks, (805) 371-8466; 2733 Pacific Coast Highway, Torrance, (310) 377-3434; 270 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa (949) 631-6627; winestyles.net

-- Corie Brown