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The oldest wine shop in town, Calandro’s Select Cellars on Government St. aims to taste nearly everything that comes in the door, says proprietor Charles Calandro, who began building the division in 1980. “We have tried to grow and change as the industry has changed,” he says. The store devoted an initial 16 feet of shelf space to wine, most of it inexpensive and mass produced, but over time, interest grew, and so did the store’s inventory and reputation.

Calandro had been working in the airline industry in Houston when a serious car accident brought him home in 1977. After wrapping up a graduate degree in history at LSU, he signed on to work in the family business. He says he didn’t know much about wine then, but that changed through crash courses with distributors and constant tasting. “To me, that’s the only way you can learn. It’s not something you can read about,” he says. Consumer interest in wine picked up considerably throughout the 90s, and Calandro renamed the wine shop “Select Cellars” to demonstrate its hands-on service and carefully-selected stock. He also added a fine wine room to stow high-end bottles. A presence on winesearcher.com has helped attract nationwide collectors drawn by gems like Calandro’s supply of 2003 and 2005 Bordeaux.

But his primary focus is to find bottles among the tens of thousands on the market that shine with value and pair well with food. “We don’t just buy everything that comes our way. We try to be very choosy and very price conscious,” he says. He and his team also jump on unusual opportunities, like the recent acquisition of Turn 4’s 2007 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. A label printing glitch helped reduce the price from more than $30 a bottle to $19 (pictured here). “We don’t go looking for discounts,” Calandro says, “but when we find something like this, we try to pass it on.”

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