Orange County-based Best Wines Online debuts

Two longtime veterans of Wine Exchange in Orange, Kyle Meyer and Tristen Beamon, have just opened an online wine shop based in Santa Ana called Best Wines Online.

The two have been working for months to streamline the concept: “We want you to feel as psyched about that next bottle of wine you buy from us as we were when we discovered it. Wine is fun, it’s relaxing, its sharing … and it is for drinking.”

The website is clean and easy to navigate. First thing you see are the featured wines, which could be anything from a Cambon La Pelouse Haut-Médoc from Bordeaux or Cap de Faugères Côtes de Castillon -- both 2009 and both $19.99 -- to a sweet Alvear Pedro Ximénez Solera sherry (1927) on sale for the same price to a 2010 Robert Craig Zinfandel Howell Mountain for $44.99 described as “arguably the greatest bottle of Zin we’ve ever tasted.”

Next up: “New Arrivals,” most of them on sale, just eight so as not to overtax your eyeballs. However, Best Wine Online’s entire collection of wines comprises some 600 labels with more arriving every day. They’re strong on value for the 2009 Bordeaux and also have a sweet cache of reasonably priced older Bordeaux, along with German, Austrian, Spanish and Italian wines.

You can easily search for wines by place, grape, vintage, numbers (i.e. points given by the wine gurus), size and price. The site also includes a number of short You Tube videos with either Meyer or Beamon or both waxing poetic about various wines in an engaging way.

Register with the site and you can set up a wish list if you don’t want to pull the trigger on a wine right that minute, but want to think about it.

Smart concept. Smart site. Note to webmaster: time to get your accents going for the imported wines.

Best Wines Online, (888) 817-8880 or (714) 979-1520, www.bestwinesonline.com.

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