Well, it was fun while it lasted. A charming little wine shop with a slightly cumbersome "style" categorization, a small inventory, corporate-driven, one hundred percent and beyond price markups, and no booze or beer sales to pay the rent, has sadly folded. Now I am back in the job hunt, and will probably have to resign myself to learning about wine one (purchased) bottle at a time like everybody else. It was most convenient, for a year and four months, to be able to sample products at the store and so learn about wine four or five or six bottles at a time, at no cost to myself. And I was even, briefly, the manager!

Did the store ever have a chance? It's hard to say. It was tucked away in the tiny, gingerbread-looking "downtown" of a wealthy suburb that an outsider would need a treasure map to find. Right across from the train station! (After-work commuters didn't stop in.) Right across from the library! (Who goes from the library to the wine shop in the course of an aftenoon's errands?) Right next to the post office! (Ditto?) And wine is such a booming business! (But what does that mean? -- booming from being the drink of maybe 6 percent of the population to being the drink of 7 percent of it?) And if only we could have put tables and chairs outside, to let customers sip and socialize al fresco in the good weather ... such good advertising ... but the town fathers would not hear of it. That's like a bar, and would lower the tone so.

In the end I suppose we simply could not compete with the lower prices and equal or better selection offered by grocery stores, discount stores, and even independent shops making ends meet by selling the quaffables we did not. Independent shops which did not, by the way, lose eleven percent of their take each month, debited to the corporate body far away. Is that normal?

All most interesting. And me with student loans to repay, and a new desire to stay in the wine business which I must, nevertheless, not allow to blind me to other, less oenophilic opportunities should they arise. The good news is that one of my favorite grocery store wines -- we never carried it -- St. Gabriel riesling in that nice blue bottle, has come down in price and is now fifty cents cheaper than it used to be. Oh dear. Overproduction? Lowered standards? Reduced demand, like gas? At any rate I'm having it tonight with that good frugal vegetable soup a la Madeleine Kamman's New Making of a Cook. "Any vegetables you like, simmered for as long as you like in plain salted water. And that is all."