Three Wine Economics Questions for 2026

December 30, 2025 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, wine, wine markets 3 Comments

The year is almost over so it is natural to start looking ahead to 2026. Here are three questions relevant to the wine industry to keep in mind as you pull corks to celebrate the new year.

Question One: Are We There Yet?

It is no secret that 2025 has been a tough year for the wine business both here in the U.S. and around the world. There are bright spots, of course, but the thousands of acres of wine grapes that went unharvested this year are a clear sign of trouble as is the continuing removal of vines and conversion of vineyards to other uses.

Some wineries had enough wine in inventory to cover sales and made little or no wine in 2025. The conventional wisdom is that the industry is not going to begin recovery until that inventory of unsold wine is drawn down (or ages out and becomes unsaleable). Will we reach that point in 2026? Or will this be another bitter vintage for growers, especially those without firm contracts?

It is not something we talk about much in the U.S., but it would speed things along a bit if the government were to consider temporary crisis distillation programs or other policies to help reduce the overhang and bring the wine market into balance. Yes, you can go too far with programs like this and encourage “zombie” vineyards and wineries that exist only because of government support. No one wants that. But there is a useful short-term adjustment role for such programs, too, and it would help draw a line under the current situation and allow the industry to move forward.

Question Two: Will They or Won’t They?

The Supreme Court will soon rule on President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff regime. Will they declare them a valid exercise of presidential power? Or will they rule that many of the tariffs violate constitutional provisions and must be rescinded?

This question has importance that goes well beyond the wine industry, but wine certainly has a dog in the fight. The full impact of the tariffs will start to be felt in 2026 through higher costs and disrupted supply chains, but some of the biggest impacts are already here, transmitted through the political system, not markets. I’m talking about the loss of our largest wine export market, Canada, in response to U.S. tariffs on Canadian products. Tariffs are often a tit-for-tat situation and U.S. wine is suffering from the retaliation effect.

There are many follow-on questions here, of course. If the SCOTUS rules against the tariffs, will the ruling stick? Or will new tariffs appear to replace the old ones to keep the legal limbo going? Will the tariff tax revenues have to be repaid? If so, where will that money come from? The list goes on, but it starts with the Supreme Court’s decision. Stay tuned.

Question Three: What Next?

The U.S. economy is something of a puzzle as we bid 2025 adieu. Is growth booming, as the most recent GDP figures seem to suggest? Or is it slowing down and maybe struggling as jobs data indicate? Is inflation pretty much under control? If so, why is “affordability” the year’s hottest word (and not in a good way)?

There are many different ways to answer these questions and economics nerds like me add one more to the list: who will lead the Federal Reserve in 2026 and how will they react to economic news as the year unfolds? The public focus will be on interest rates. Up or down? But the bigger question is how we will navigate the traps and trade-offs of a complex, highly indebted, rapidly evolving economy.

I think this is a wine economics question because I believe that affordability is a significant explanation for the current malaise in wine sales. It’s not the only issue, but it matters. If you think of affordability as roughly the cost of living divided by disposable income, then what the Federal Reserve does is important because it can affect both the numerator and the denominator in many ways. There’s a lot at stake.

What’s next for the wine economy? And what unexpected events (unknown unknowns in the Donald Rumsfeld taxonomy) will appear? 2026 will be many things, but it won’t be boring!

Wine and the Ghosts of Christmas Past

December 23, 2025 By Mike Veseth in Oregon wine, wine, Wine Competitions, wine history Leave a comment

I was trying to think what Sue and I could give to Wine Economist readers for Christmas. We decided to re-tell this story about a completely different Christmas gift from many years ago. I’m not sure why, but I think it makes sense. We hope you enjoy it.

Grape Transformations: Oregon Origins

The Wine Economist / November 8, 2011

I had a hidden agenda when I visited McMinnville, Oregon a few weeks ago. Ostensibly I was there to talk about my new book at Linfield College and to the local Rotary Club. Those events were great but I would not have been happy if I hadn’t done one more thing: return a minor piece of Oregon’s wine history to its rightful home.

“To Nick, Cheers for all the years — past & future. David Lett, Christmas 1989.”

That is the inscription I found in a second-hand bookstore copy of Vintage Timelines, a neglected classic book that Jancis Robinson wrote over twenty years ago. The idea of the book was to select a group of the world’s greatest wines and examine how different vintages have evolved (and would be expected to continue to evolve) over time. The research required Jancis to taste trough verticals of each great wine (research is such a drag!) and compare notes from previous years to create complex and quite fascinating graphical timelines.

Darn few American wines were good enough (in terms of their ageing potential) to make the cut and only one wine outside of California — the Eyrie Pinot Noir Reserve made by David Lett. Lett planted the first Pinot Noir vines in the Willamette Valley and he, along with the group they call “the Pioneers,” set Oregon wine on its present course.

Nick’s Back Room

The Nick in the inscription is almost certainly Nick Peirano of Nick’s Italian Cafe. Lett’s audacious egg was incubated and eventually hatched by the Pioneers and others over countless discussions in Nick’s back room. I’ve loved owning the book, but felt it didn’t belong to me. I needed to take it home and give it back. But to whom?

My first thought was my friend Scott Chambers, a professor at Linfield College and a friend of both Nick and the Lett family. He’d love to have the book, I thought, but it didn’t really belong to him any more than me. Maybe Jason Lett, David’s winemaking son who is carrying on the Eyrie tradition and building upon it? Yes, that would make sense.

But then I learned about the Oregon Wine History Project at Linfield College and that sealed the deal. They were pleased to add our copy of Vintage Timelines to their archive as a document chronicling the Eyrie Reserve’s early international recognition as well as the role of Nick’s back room in the region’s early development. Jeff Peterson, Director of the Linfield Center for the Northwest, accepted the book and both Scott and Jason supported the decision.

A Remarkable Story: David Lett (and the Pioneers)

David Lett is one of my heros and I am including him in my “Grape Transformations” list of people who have changed the way people think about wine or wine regions. He was certainly instrumental in the transformation of Oregon from a place known for fruit and nuts rather than grapes to a region frequently mentioned in the same breath with Burgundy.

Lett’s story is remarkable. Trained at UC/Davis, he came north looking for terroir where he could make Pinot in the Burgundian style. The first Pinot vines were planted in 1965; 1970 was the first Eyrie Pinot vintage. After one or two false starts he hit paydirt. Great wine.

But from Oregon? Rainy old Oregon probably seemed like the last place on earth to make world class wine in the 1970s.

Olympic Gold

Then came the Wine Olympics of 1979. This was a competition, sponsored by the French food and wine magazine Gault Millau, that featured 330 wines from 33 countries tasted blind by 62 judges. The 1975 Eyrie Pinot Noir Reserve attracted attention by placing 10th among Pinots. A stunning achievement for a wine from a previously unknown wine region.

Robert Drouhin of Maison Joseph Drouhin, a Burgundy negociant and producer, was fascinated and sponsored a further competition where the Eyrie wine came close second behind Drouhin’s own 1959 Chambolle-Musigny. Thus was Eyrie’s reputation set (and Oregon’s, too). It wasn’t long before Domaine Drouhin Oregon (DDO) was built in the same Dundee Hills as Eyrie’s vineyards — a strong endorsement of the terroir and recognition of the achievement.

The Pioneers founded the Oregon wine industry, but now the torch has been passed to a group that you might call the Sons [and Daughters] of the Pioneers. Some of them appear in the video at the top of this post (don’t be discouraged by the poor audio at the start — it gets better quickly). I’ll have something to say about this group in an upcoming post.

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Special thanks to Scott Chambers and Jason Lett for their hospitality during our stay in McMinnville.

Book Reviews: Sacred Wine, Stikky Wine, Kinda Like Wine

December 16, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education, wine history Leave a comment

A lot of the wine books we receive fall into a few familiar categories. Here are brief reviews of two “category buster” wine books (plus one about Sake) that give a new spin on tried, true formats.

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Emily Stimpson Chapman, Sacred Wine: The Holy History and Heritage of Catholic Vintners. Marian Press, 2025.

The history of wine and the history of the Catholic church are deeply intertwined. Sacred Wine wants you to understand and appreciate this history and learn a few lessons along the way.

The lure (if wine isn’t enough) is the collection of beautiful photographs that makes this a book that’s probably going to start off on the coffee table. But the stories, which are well told, are so interesting that it is likely to move to your nightstand or reading chair before too long.

Twelve wineries scattered over France, Italy, and Spain provide twelve opportunities to explore church and wine history. All of the wineries have been molded in some way by the Catholic faith, often starting as monasteries, but in other respects they are quite different. Some are famous (Burgundy’s Chateau de Vougeot). Some make wines that are nearly impossible to taste unless you visit the winery, but others (Abbazia di Novacella) are widely distributed. Some of the wineries are very old indeed while others are unexpecxtedly modern. All are beautiful, as these photos demonstrate. Each tells a different story about God, wine, and history.

The Marian Press is the imprint of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception and they intend with this book to inform about wine and the church and to encourage readers to perhaps visit these wineries and to sample their wines or ones like them.

It is kind of inspiring to think, as Sacred Wine encourages you to do, that the liquid in your glass means something more; that it connects you somehow to something altogether more important. Not your typical coffee table wine book.

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Andrea Reibel, Stikky Wine. Laurence Holt Books, 2025.

There are a lot of variations on the “introduction to wine” book genre, but Stikky Wine is a new twist. Or new to me, in any case.

The idea is not to teach novice wine drinkers everything they need to know about wine. It is to give them a few basic tools that they use to each themselves. It is part of a small series of “stikky” books on different topics that focus on information that “sticks” and not the stuff you read and forget.

The concept reminds me of Father Guido Sarducci’s famous Five Minute University, which promised to provide a complete college education in five minutes time. How? By only teaching the stuff that sticks; the things you still remember after five years. As a recovering professor I have mixed emotions about the Five Minute University, but I find the idea of Stikky Wine very appealing.

Stikky Wine introduces the idea of wine tasting through wine’s aromas, initially focusing on fruit aromas that most readers will be familiar with. There are some aromas closely associated with white wines and other for red wines. These aroma ideas are then applied to three red wines (Pinot Noir, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon) and three white wines (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay). The simple framework permits a number of variations and applications so that the reader has some idea of how wines differ and why. Significantly, readers are encouraged to set their book down and do wine instead of just thinking wine.

The second section builds on this by adding sensory concepts like body, acidity, tannins, and other types of aromas (including those associated with wine faults). Six aroma families, three sensory elements. Pretty basic tools, but important ones. An epilogue ties things together followed by Next Steps with more detailed information and references designed to propel the reader forward.

The format is user-friendly. It is almsot a flip book, with lots of illustrations, minimal text, quizzers, reviews, and so forth. It reminds me a bit of the sort of flash cards you might use to study a foreign language except the focus is on doing, not just memorizing.

Stikky Books says its products are tested thoroughly and really do help readers get from zero to sixty in wine understanding in about an hour. I can’t vouch for that because I’m not a beginner making new discoveries, but it seems like a plausible claim.

The thing to do would be to give the book to someone starting out and see what happens. It might be an excellent $12 investment, don’t you think?

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Eric C. Rath, Kampai: The History of Sake. Reaktion Books, 2025.

Sake isn’t wine. It isn’t rice wine either, although I have heard it explained that way. Sake is Sake.

Sake is one thing, but it is also many things and that’s what makes it kinda like wine (as this article’s heading suggests). Some people are drawn to the complexity and variety. Others are turned off (or even freaked out) by the myriad variations. Wine is the same in many ways. How do we invite the intimidated into the tent without scaring them away? It’s a problem.

Eric C. Rath’s new book opens the door with history, told is an approachable way. Readers get drawn into the story and pretty soon the complications start to make sense. It doesn’t hurt that the heavy coated stocks makes the beautifuyl illustrations pop of the page.

Rath is a professor of premodern Japanese history of the University of Kansas. I’ll bet he is an excellent teacher because his book is clear and interesting and taught me a lot I didn’t know about Sake and about Japan. Rath uses history very effectively to teach about Sake and, I suppose, Sake to teach about history. Sacred Wine (see above) uses wine to teach about history and faith. Glad to welcome both these books to the wine (and kinda like wine) bookshelf.

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Three Faces of a Neighborhood Wine Renaissance

December 9, 2025 By Mike Veseth in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Last week’s Wine Economist reported on an unexpected development in our local wine scene. Against all odds, interest in wine seems to be growing in our part of Tacoma, Washington. A number of new businesses have opened recently raising wine’s profile in the neighborhood. What’s going on?

We surveyed the situation last week and promised you a deeper dive. Here it is.

Metropolitan Market

Our story begins in 1990 when the Metropolitan Market opened on Proctor Street on a site that had been home to a variety of supermarkets over the years. It always had a wine aisle, but as the Met upped its game (and as supermarkets evolved in the U.S.), the wine wall changed with it. Here’s what I wrote about it in Chapter 3 of Wine Wars II.

The Metropolitan Market on Proctor Street in Tacoma, Washington, is a typical upscale American supermarket. It has all the upscale basics: a delicatessen and a fishmonger, fresh seasonal local produce, a coffee bar and gelato stand. You can buy cat food, corn flakes, and laundry soap at competitive prices. There is sushi, too, along with various panini, and espresso drinks that pair nicely with a proprietary chocolate chip snack called The Cookie. Or, for $6.99, you can take home a quarter of a 1.9 kilogram loaf of Polâine whole grain sourdough bread, flown in fresh from Paris every Wednesday. Eat it plain – it is delicious – or top with European butter and a swish of raw monofloral Manuka honey from New Zealand. You can find them all on the Met’s generous shelves.

The Metropolitan Market is the kind of store that is increasingly common in American cities, patronized by people like me, who take their culinary cues from celebrity chefs on the Food Network. It is to foodies what Home Depot is to the DIY set: an adult toy store where imaginations can run wild.

You probably have a store like the Met in your town and, since you are reading this book, you probably go there frequently so that you can check out the wine wall. I’d like you to go there now (or if that’s not convenient, to imagine that you are there) because this chapter requires your participation. I don’t really want to tell you what the wine world looks like, although that’s easy enough to do. I want you to see for yourself—and to be surprised.

I’m sending you to the supermarket because that’s where the battle for the future of wine is being waged. It isn’t the only battlefield; the idea of wine is contested wherever and whenever wine is bought and sold. Restaurants and bars. Wine shops and auction floors. Tasting rooms and cellar doors. Shoot, I’ve even bought wine in the middle of the night, directly from the maker, from the back of a pickup truck on a dark city street. (Don’t ask.)

But the supermarket is the central stage of this story and that’s where we need to begin. And to understand what’s going on there we will need to inspect it closely, looking for the key to its secret code.

Upscale supermarkets like the Met are about many things: service, selection, and maybe even opulence (The Met’s Cookie is certainly opulent). Significantly, they are also about identity, and wine fills an important niche, reinforcing and differentiating their identities and linking them to the lifestyles, both actual and aspirational, of their customers.

Maybe the most important thing about the Met over the years has been the people who make it happen. Patrick (aka “the wine guy”) was, until his semi-retirement, a key element of the local wine culture. He was particularly important to us at The Wine Economist because of his knowledge of the wine business and trends. The Met helped raise the profile of wine in the neighborhood and establish it as part of the local culture.

Browne Family Vineyards Tasting Room

Precept Wine was rated as the 12th largest U.S. wine company by Wine Business Monthly earlier this year with an estimated 2.75 million cases sold per year. The company produces wine under many brands, but the current focus is on Browne Family Vineyards, Gruet, and House Wine according to the WBM report.

CEO Andrew Browne reports that his team was drawn to Tacoma and the Proctor District when they were planning tasting room locations. The Proctor Safeway and the Metropolitan Market had very strong wine programs and the neighborhood was both growing and developing a distinctive vibe. “We always viewed being near great retailers and bringing the ‘storytelling / nice setting / friendly people’ quality approach would lift all boats—a rising tide,” Browne says. “That is exactly the result we have seen in Tacoma.”

“When we opened in 2020, ‘jumpstarting’ the wine scene wasn’t on our radar,” comments Precept chief marketing officer Alexandra Evans. “Our goal was simpler: create a NYC-quality experience right in our backyard. Andrew had just moved to Tacoma—a place dear to many of our hearts—and we wanted to build a gathering spot where people could enjoy great local wine and feel at home. A place that genuinely brought value to our home community. Seeing the momentum build with more tasting rooms, wine bars, and shops has been thrilling.”

Like the Met Market, Browne Family Vineyards is all about investing in people, both the tasting room staff and the neighborhood. As Browne notes, “We believed in Tacoma’s potential—the food culture, the highly engaged community thirsty for quality experience, it was a safe bet. What our tasting room proved is that you don’t need to be in wine country to build wine culture. You just need to show up authentically and honor people’s choice to spend their hard-earned time and money with you. We feel deeply responsible for delivering on that promise!”

Sue and I like to meet friends and colleagues at Browne Family Vineyards. There is a feeling that is both comfortable and sophisticated. The wine flights are great conversation starters. And I like the fact that in Tacoma, the “City of Destiny,” you can order wine from a collection that proclaims “Do Epic Sh*t!” An inspiration. And an important step in the evolution of the neighborhood wine scene.

Corbeau Restaurant

Corbeau opened in the Proctor District a little more than a year ago and caught our attention by positioning itself as a “Franco-Tacoman” restaurant, which translates to French cuisine and sensibility with local Tacoma-area ingredients. We intended to give it a try, but somehow something always came up. That changed recently when we looked at their wine program.

Corbeau is the creation of Tacoma native Trevor Hamilton, whose restaurant wine resume includes spells at Canlis in Seattle and The Table in Tacoma, and executive chef Craig Tronset, whose experiences include Bastille in Seattle and The Table in Tacoma.

Corbeau took over a spot that was the long-time home of an Italian-American restaurant and I suppose it has taken a while for people like us to find out what’s going on. What we’ve discovered in recent visits is a warm environment with friendly staff, excellent service, and food that is both distinctive and delicious. You can sense the personal touch at every turn.

On the beverage side, Corbeau is about wine but not just wine. The cocktail and mocktail menus are interesting and many of the tables we’ve seen have brightly colored drinks on display. But, of course, it was the wine that drew us in. The wine list is long but not encyclopedic, about 70 percent French, and includes a special list of bottles priced at less than $60. So it is serious about wine.

But Corbeau is also playful about wine and inviting. This becomes clear when you consider the by-the-glass page of the wine list. There are more than a dozen choices and they are presented in an unusual way (see above). The coded wine references are arrayed along two axes: delicate to powerful and natty to nice.

Natty? Well, low intervention (natural wine depending upon how you define that). The idea is a play on the Santa Claus “naughty and nice” idea. What this does, according to wine director Mason Pack, is start a conversation about what you are interested in trying and the many different faces that wine can present. It’s a different way to think about wine. What fun.

Our first visit (with friends Zari and Greg) focused on Natty and Nice wines paired with happy hour burgers, fries, and salad. But we soon returned, drawn by the arrival of a bottle of Pignolo, a red wine from Friuli that is so rare that it is almost invisible.

Anatomy of a Renaissance

So how does a wine renaissance happen in a world where news reports constantly reinforce the wine industry’s struggles? I can’t answer that question in general terms but I have a couple of ideas based on wine businesses covered last week and above in these Wine Economist columns.

The first observation is simple. It’s not about the wine. It’s about the people. Growing a wine culture or any culture has to start with people and their dreams and visions.

The second thing is that a renaissance doesn’t happen all at once. Change happens gradually and then suddenly as momentum builds. You can’t always be sure that a first step will be followed by others, but it is terrific when it works.

The thing that these businesses (and the others we wrote about last week) have in common is that they are different. Different from other businesses in some ways and different from each other. Wine isn’t a single thing. It is many things. This means that there are many ways for wine to connect to the community.

Our little neighborhood has developed a vibrant wine scene. Can it sustain its identity and maybe even continue to grow in the current unfavorable environment? Fingers crossed that wine’s light will grow brighter in the coming year.

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Thanks to everyone we talked to about the Proctor wine scene. We couldn’t really do justice to what’s happening in a short column like this, but we tried.

Against the Tide: A Town Where Wine is Cool

December 2, 2025 By Mike Veseth in wine 3 Comments

Most of the news we read about the wine market is depressing. Consumers are drinking less wine, buying less wine, and seemingly less interested in alcoholic beverages in general. The world has hit “peak wine,” according to The Economist newspaper. It’s all downhill from here. Many different causes are cited, but the bottom line is almost always the same. The rising tide that lifted wine to higher levels in the past has reversed course.

We see evidence of this trend everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except in our backyard, where wine seems to be cool and getting cooler. A puzzle! Here is our report about the unexpected rise of wine in our little neighborhood. Are there broader lessons here? Read on and make up your own mind.

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Tacoma, Washington, a wine destination? Huh? We wouldn’t have thought so, and yet … A new wine bar, Valo, opened in our neighborhood, a block from an existing and popular wine bar, Browne Family Vineyards. Two tasting rooms/wine bars? In our little neighborhood?

We started looking around and were surprised. From Wine Economist World Headquarters, we can walk 15 minutes to those two winery tasting rooms, at least two restaurants that feature wine, and two wine-friendly supermarkets. A little further afield, within three miles of World HQ, we have several wine shops, more tasting rooms, and restaurants, and a farm store that features 3000 different wines on its shelves.

What’s going on here? Is wine cool again?

Context: The Neighborhood

Sue and I live in a neighborhood called the Proctor District (Tacoma is as much a collection of neighborhoods as it is an identifiable city). Our little shopping district was born years ago when two streetcar lines intersected at the corner of North Proctor and North 26th Streets.

The economic nexus thus created grew to include two supermarkets, two public schools, a church, a library, bowling alley, a firehouse, a post office, an historical movie theater, Saturday farmers’ market, and a collection of small shops, salons, offices, restaurants, and bakeries lining the city streets in the old way that predates strip malls. I am not sure how many places there are to buy coffee drinks in the Proctor District, but you are never far away from a caffeine fix.

The campus of the University of Puget Sound is less than a mile away and the University Washington Tacoma is not too far by bus or Uber. The population of the area has grown in the past decade through construction of several apartment buildings and a zoning policy that looks favorably on auxiliary dwelling units. Housing costs are not low in absolute terms, but look affordable compared with the Seattle area.

The domain of this report also includes a neighborhood called Old Town, which is about a mile away. It is a much smaller collection of businesses located, as the name suggests, in the historic home of Tacoma where Commencement Bay with its docks and mills met up with the railroad line.

Supermarket Wine

The first hint that wine is cool around here can be found in the two supermarkets that sit on opposite sides of Proctor Street at the entrance to the district. One is a Safeway store that fits the profile of a typical good supermarket of its type, except that is is perhaps a bit smaller than many stores today because it is constrained by the limited footprint of the original store lot.

Directly across the street is the Metropolitan Market, which featured in Chapter 3 of my Wine Wars books. It is is part of a small regional chain of upscale supermarkets of the Whole Foods/Wegmans genre but more compact than newer stores, again because the smaller scale of the original store’s footprint.

The stores are very different in terms of their scope and focus, but they both have strong wine departments and we see lots of wine going through the checkout stands. The two wine walls seemed to have evolved to complement as much as compete. The Met has a better selection of wines from smaller producers in Washington and Oregon, for example, and its range of European wines is very good, too.

Safeway features wine from larger producers from California and Washington, but with many unexpected gems scattered on the shelves, a tribute to the talented Albertson/Safeway wine team. When I sent students to Safeway to study the economic geography of the wine wall a few years ago, they found prices that ranged from about $2 per bottle equivalent to over $200 per bottle, so something for everyone.

Winery Tasting Rooms

But that’s just the beginning. The fact that our neighborhood has supermarkets that feature good wine programs is important, but not necessarily exceptional. More noteworthy is the rise of tasting rooms, wine bars, and wine shops. They provide evidence of a changing, rising wine scene.

The Browne Family Vineyards tasting room opened in late 2020 and immediately drew good crowds for flights, glasses, and bottles of Andrew Browne’s wines along with snacks and other beverages from the Browne portfolio. It is the third Browne tasting room to open after Walla Walla and Seattle. Andrew Browne (CEO of Precept Wine) was drawn to the Proctor District’s dynamic vibe. The tasting room is a very comfortable place to meet friends and enjoy wine. It has been busy enough during our recent visits that we reserved tables. Think of the Browne tasting room as “proof of concept” that wine still draws a crowd.

Now there is another winery tasting room in the Proctor District. And a brewery tap room, too. The Valo Wine tasting room opened a block from Browne last month joining Narrows Brewing taproom just a few doors down the street. Gradually, then suddenly, the opportunities to enjoy wine, beer, and other adult beverages have blossomed in the neighborhood. Is this normal?

Shops, Bars, and Restaurants

The Pacific Northwest Shop isn’t really a wine store; it features local arts, crafts, and foods. But it has long been know as a place to go to find a selection local wines, too, especially those from smaller producers.

Tacoma Wine Merchants opened its new store in Old Town in 2022, moving from a much smaller location in the Stadium neighborhood (named for Stadium High School, which you might remember from “10 Things I Hate About You”). It is an attractive wine shop with interesting wines and warm atmosphere. It hosts frequent tastings that draw a good crowd.

The Old Town wine scene gained momentum in 2024 when the Bordeaux Wine Bar opened just a block away from Tacoma Wine Merchants. It is an outpost of the Bordeaux Wine Bar in Enumclaw, Washington. It is a good place to hang out, enjoy wine and food, and take advantage of regular tastings.

There have always been restaurants with interesting wine lists in the Proctor neighborhood (and even more in the 6th Avenue district a short drive away). But things are getting even better. A restaurant called Corbeau opened in the Proctor District a little over a year ago and got attention with a long list of mainly French wines. Corbeau has billed itself as “Franco-Tacoman cuisine,” which can be translated as French cuisine and sensibility combined with Tacoma-area regional ingredients. If you are interested in wine, as we will explain next week, Corbeau takes the local scene to an unexpected new level.

Something’s Happening Here

So what’s the “so what?” here. The wine market has been in decline for most of the last five years. Wine’s tide has been going out. But our little neighborhood has seen a significant bump in wine activity. It is worth noting, celebrating, and maybe analyzing a bit.

How do these new wine establishments work and what do they have in common? Come back next week for business profiles and some thoughts, focusing on Metropolitan Market, the store that some say started the Proctor District renaissance; the Browne Family Vineyards tasting room; and Corbeau, the Franco-Tacoman restaurant.