Wine at the Piggly Wiggly

Last weekend, when I was in Charleston for a math conference, I stopped by the grocery store to get some Diet Cheerwine. Imagine my surprise to find out that the Piggly Wiggly had a fairly decent wine selection.

Christina and I had seen it suggested on TV that grocery stores were good places to get wine bargains. Due to Maryland's liquor laws, it's rare to find a grocery store that sells wine in Maryland. I believe the law is that a corporation may only have one liquor license per county. In particular, there is one branch of Giant Food not too far from here that sells beer and wine. It's on my way home from work, but I never stop there -- they don't have an automated checkout, so it's actually faster to go out of my way to a different store.

We went there a couple of weeks ago, and the selection wasn't great. The few interesting selections were things we could get more cheaply at Corridor Fine Wine in Laurel.

The Piggly Wiggly, however, was a different story. I was looking for something to bring back to Christina, so I selected the Carmen Carmenere. As we had seen on another TV show, the Carmenere grape had disappeared from the vineyards of Bordeaux over a century ago. It was recently rediscovered in Chile, where it had incorrectly been labeled as Merlot. We're looking forward to trying it.