It’s always pouring here, rain or shine

Have you ever been to a party where you had a really good time, alcohol was involved, and your grandmother could comfortably attend?

Aside from your cheap champagne-fueled wedding, the answer is probably “no.” If you have experienced one of the many wine tastings at Silverlake Wine, make that a “yes.”

It’s a contemporary little shop with a mission, a style and a selection that sidesteps most of what’s wrong with wine, bars and wine stores these days. What’s stuffy, smarmy or snobby elsewhere is funny, welcoming and educational at the Silverlake Wine tastings. For most events, you don’t need advance payments or reservations (except on Sundays). And the shop owners stock 700-plus eclectic, mid-priced wines, and they’ll take pains to explain them.

The store’s liquor license allows consumption on the premises, so the owners -- former Campanile wine director George Cossette, his former assistant Randy Clement and their partner April Langford -- worked with Ana Henton Design to make a multitasking bar within a shop. At its regular tastings, Cossette pours samples of three to five wines (either in flights or matched to hors d’oeuvres) while customers who pay from $8 to $20, depending on the event, circulate among the glass-topped, bar-height display cases.

Sure, people are having a good time, but with sample-size 3-ounce pours, the levity is self-limiting: The intent is to taste, not to get wasted, not on purpose. Things get a little looser on Thursday’s “flight nights,” when some patrons consume the featured flights, one red, one white, three samples each. “Blue Mondays,” billed as “blatant low-key relaxation,” features three wines with cheese from the Cheese Store of Silverlake.

When I’m not leafing through an atlas of the wine regions of Italy during a Piedmont tasting or poking through the $10 Australian whites, I’m usually categorizing the crowd by some characteristic or another.

Here’s a Hair Category: Unruly curls of young adulthood, stick-straight black-dyed gothic, upswept gray and shellacked weekly with Aqua Net at the beauty parlor, neat corporate, skanky shaggy and the $400 cut pinched into a rubber band.

If you can’t attend, Clement’s weekly e-mail is entertainment enough. A classic: “Wanna hear something cool? Some kid (I hope it was just a kid) threw an egg at our store Tuesday night, and in the morning, it was so hot, the egg cooked on the concrete!”

Now would-be competitors have tried to copy the concept, but that’s a lost cause.

“It works because of the people,” Clement says, “not just because it looks cool.”

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Silverlake Wine

Where: 2395 Glendale Blvd., Silver Lake

When: Tastings 5 to 9 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays; 3 p.m. Sundays

Cost: $8 to $20

Info: (323) 662-9024; www.silverlakewine.com