Where Wine Is A One-Woman Show

Urban Vintage

By PETER HELLMAN
March 5, 2008

A neighborhood wine shop is like an old-fashioned apothecary — or so it struck me while hanging out one recent afternoon at Frankly Wines, a new and tiny shop in TriBeCa. Customers come into both kinds of establishments looking for savvy counsel. The difference, of course, is that at a wine shop, they're seeking prescriptions to bring pleasure and well-being, not relief from pain or illness. One such seeker at this shop was a stylish young woman who said to proprietor Christy Frank, "My boyfriend is cooking catfish for dinner. What can you recommend for around $15?"

"How will he cook the catfish?" Ms. Frank asked, but the young woman couldn't say.

"He'll probably batter fry it," Ms. Frank said. She took a few steps — that's as far as you can go in any direction in this shop — and plucked off the shelf a bottle of MonteNovo ($13), a Spanish white wine made from an obscure but lively grape called godello. "This is delicate enough so it won't overwhelm the catfish, but it's also got some nice body so it'll stand up to the batter," she said.

After the customer had gone on her way, Ms. Frank said, "That's the fun stuff — when people give you definitive constraints and a price point."

"It's often a trick to figure out the difference between what they say and what they mean," she says of her customers. And sometimes, the trick is to suggest the unexpected. A major challenge was posed, for example, by a customer who needed a gift bottle for a friend with a trophy cellar — but the customer's price limit was $25. "I gave him a bottle of a wine nobody's heard of — Dr. Konstantin Frank's Rkatsiteli, a Georgian variety that has a small planting in the Finger Lakes," she says. "My theory is, if you can't spend the big money, then go obscure."

Growing up in Tiffin, Ohio ("surrounded by cornfields"), Ms. Frank says, "I won't tell you how young I was when I started drinking wine coolers." Her introduction to the real thing came when she took a wine appreciation course at Cornell University, and worked for a local wine shop. In 2007, after equipping herself with an MBA from Columbia, Ms. Frank worked for Moet-Hennessy USA, an upscale importer. Seven years later, she says, "I couldn't stand to write one more brand plan, so I thought, okay, I'm going to open a wine shop. Everyone said, 'Oh, retail hours, you're working all the time.' The reality is, as a brand manager, I was working all the time anyway."

It took just two weeks for her to find a location on West Broadway south of Chambers Street, only a block away from her TriBeCa home. While she can't match the stock of bigger shops, she points to a marketing experiment that shows that smaller can be advantageous: "If you offer people their choice of a dozen different jams, they don't know which to buy. But if they try just four, then they can make a decision."

Thanks to Ms. Frank's tight editing, her selection of 220 wines feels anything but skimpy. The only glaringly deficient category is Loire wines — but hers is a deliberate decision, given that the city's greatest collection from that region is just a few blocks away at Chambers Street Wines. "No use trying to compete with nirvana," she says. Her tilt is toward Southern Hemisphere wines, where she believes value is greatest, especially at the high end. "There's a lot of genuinely great $80 wine from down there, which is only the starting point for California's top end," she says. Among those down-under gems are the hard-to-find Columella ($85), a superb Rhone-style blend from South Africa; Dry River Pinot Noir, a New Zealand beauty ($86.99), and Gosset's Polish Hill Riesling ($35), Australia's premier bottling of this food-friendly variety.

For now, Ms. Frank is the sole employee of the 3-month-old shop. When I last stopped in, Ms. Frank had just delivered a case of wine to a Murray Street condo, even though she's due to give birth to her third child in June. "I've still got a good month before I give up the hand truck," she said. Blessed with a great nanny, she plans to be back at work within weeks. "Maternity leave has a whole different meaning when it's your own business," she says.

Note: Next weekend, wine buffs can sample wines from 170 international producers at the first ever New York Wine Expo, to be held at the Javits Convention Center. Seminar offerings include Mark Oldman's "Outsmarting Wine 101" and "New York's Riesling Renaissance." Friday, 7 p.m.–10 p.m. (tickets are $85 on Friday), Saturday, 2 p.m.–6 p.m. ($95). Information at wine-expos.com/wine/ny.