For today’s installment of our local holiday shopping series, we talked on Tuesday afternoon to Carl Franco of Franco’s Wine Merchants at 130 Elm St.
Here’s a transcription of our interview.
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New Canaanite: The shopping season officially kicked off on Black Friday. How’s it going in the early days here?
Carl Franco: “The grand vin 2016 Chateau L’Evangile is more primordial than the second wine, sporting a deep purple color and a huge nose of blueberries, scrub brush, violets, graphite and lead pencil shavings. Deep, massively textured, with building minerality, a brilliant mid-palate, I’d imagine this is a modern-day version of the 1982. A sexy wine, it should drink well in four to six years, but is capable of lasting for two, three decades.” Priced at $2,000 for a six-bottle case. Photo credit: Michael Dinan
Carl Franco: Usually people are a little slow right after Thanksgiving, and they always take a few days, or sometimes a week. But with Thanksgiving so late this year, I think people just realized it’s 30 days for Christmas. It’s been steady. People are not dragging their feet.
The Holiday Stroll is coming up this weekend. What do you have planned for visitors?
We’ll have a wine tasting here on Saturday afternoon and of course we’ll be open Friday night. A lot of the stores around are hosting and so we’re running up and down the street because everyone’s pouring wine and they’re ordering it from us. We’ll be busy with our customers here, and making sure all the other retailers are well stocked for their evening, and then Saturday we’ll have wine tasting in the afternoon.
Carl Franco: “This is the Samuel Adams ‘Utopias.’ It’s a biennial release, it takes them two years to make this beer, and we were lucky to get one of them. Not many are around and so we have it for that lucky beer drinker.” Priced at $299.99. Photo credit: Michael Dinan
Franco’s has been selling wine and spirits literally since the day Prohibition ended. In these intervening 100 years, other liquor stores have come online. What makes Franco’s stand out among them? What would you say to people who maybe are just learning the landscape here as they shop for their holiday wines?
What stands out is people come in when they have their party orders, because they don’t know what to order, and they don’t know how much to order. And so we just help them along. We always make sure they have enough for their party. We gladly take back the returns if they’ve overbought or when we help them produce the numbers, we like to just add in a cushion so you don’t run out.
Carl Franco: “In the Stag’s Leap Artemis, we have it in two sizes: the 1.5 liter and the 3 liter bottle. All great for big crowds.” Priced at $224.99 and $450. Photo credit: Michael Dinan
We’ve seen recent changes to the parking on Elm Street, I guess it officially changed over to paid in October. How is that affecting you? What are you seeing?
I am trying to find the pattern here. I think we really have to get through the holiday season to see where it goes. I have a lot of people ask me whether we can run out to the car if they pull up, which of course we do. And I think I find a lot of people are parking up in the free parking [Park Street] lot as well. I’m hoping the alley [next to the Playhouse] is going to be finished soon. I must admit, I wish they had been done earlier. They knew this was happening. They knew the meters were coming in, and it’s tough to be in the middle of the holiday season right now and have that access closed off.