frenzy welcome to the belmont business report today have we have with us chris ben wa chris is the owner of the spirited gourmet at four forty eight common street cushing square  deli so we can do slice meats slice cheeses make sandwiches probably get maybe like ten different sandwiches at any given time that we offer and most important thing is the bread th on a little bit on the higher end side but they don't have nitrates and they just really phenomenally delicious meats so we have all sorts of different way of turkeys and roast beef from where is this from from all over the world a lot of stuff that we actually have some local cheeses as well we have a lot of from vermont but we get you know we have  you were originally started doing wine tastings and i'm sure you're still doing those yeah we do every in fact every friday night from five to eight we do wine tasting and typically will have something else going where there could be a food demonstration by one of our local producers or sometimes we do beer tastings or maybe even a spirit tasting and then every saturday from four to seven we also have wine tastings no charge i mean it's just come on in and it's  of the thing that the thing that's different about our business than most of the stores is that we don't buy what i would call commodity ones which are winds that come from bigger companies bigger wine companies  that could be even smaller winery but it got bought by one of the big conglomerates and kind of changes how they they make their wine and it becomes more profit oriented whereas what we what we like to do is we go for the small producers who they're really just farmers and they are very passionate about the wine they make and because you're not paying from the corporate overhead all you're paying for is the wi itself so we believe that we can sell you a bottle of wine from it could be a producer you've never heard of before but put that up against one of the more name brands and we can give you a superior wine for  less money but in order to do that we you know you have to have tastings because of the fact that again that that people they're not known names to to our customers to uncover you know really superior one of the pros those are the ones that we bring in soda so my wine director and myself occasionally will sit down and we have our suppliers will come in and show us different wines in typically what you want to do is you want to you can tell the quality of the wine obviously by drinking it but then it's like the important thing is ok so what price we pay for this so you can if you've been doing it long enough you can taste the wine and kind of have a rough idea about what is sh cost and oftentimes it could come in the actual price could be fifty percent to say seventy percent of your head what you believe the value of that one if i wanted to if i wanted to get you know what what we we have hundreds of wine that i mean i would say you can get a very good bottle life for twelve to fifteen dollars and that's our sweet spot and we it's interesting because he'll talk to people who aren't as familiar with the store but they always  u s is being because it's a nice story of the looks physically it's attractive and we have a they have they think that you must have all your ways must be expensive and that can be further from the truth because what we again like to show people is that if you put the effort in to go find these wines you can find extremely well made wines for you know like i said ten fifteen dollars you guys there's a lot of vineyards as well to buy from now when we buy there's there's a lot of  distributors in massachusetts and we tend to do most of our business with the smaller smaller distributors in importers so they they actually bring the wines to you to try or you can go outside what they'll do is they have tastings every every spring and every fall when new vantages are coming out they have these big casings that you can go to so you can literally go in and they could be you know one hundred different wines that you can try so again so you get to go in taste wines see which are like see what's you know again we always try to find things that are a good value and and then those are the ones that we want to bring in and you know we  know as well we spent quite a bit of time in italy we have a little house on a on an island off another coast of sicily and we have so many ads there that we rent to a wine maker and he's been trying to figure out how to sell his wine in the us and he can't figure out how to get out of italy so  dollars it's either but it you know that the price you pay over there was just a fraction of that in the right it's fantastic so but i sneak in my two wattles whenever i make a trip and that's it and i would like i would love to be able to get some over here at some locations so yeah i mean we can figure out how to do that so we've actually we've we've helped out we've helped winemakers before because we know the lay of the land here as far as what are the what are the good  distributors and they're all pretty good but there is that that are better than others so for instance we do business with this company idea why it's out and that free and they specialize their plate that the sweet spot in their portfolio is the  very very good so it would be interesting to see if there was some way of getting that over here but then he went there to get to be able to make an introduction it so the spirit so obviously very important part of the business we were talking the liquor are quite a bit different yeah well you know you buy but yeah i was saying you know you can that i can have if i go to kapisa liquors and look at their look at their price for a grey goose they actually sell it for cheaper than i can buy it so i really the way i was the way i set up my business was to again the main focus is on wine we also want to make you know make sure that we have a really good food program because to me you know it's food and wine go together that's the whole to it's almost like you know trying to show people like the european lifestyle and just enjoying good food in wine and just you know taking a little bit time out of the day to enjoy life but when you look at the beer and spirits that offer it's really it's almost more of like a convenient convenience store model in that i would tell somebody again it's likely you would you know want if you're going to stock up your liquor cabinet if even for me i would go because i can't buy you know it's cheaply as they can so you really have to buy you have to buy a huge quantities of spirits in order to be able to sell them cheaply so what i try to do is carry spirits from the mid it is because it's you know you don't want to give somebody somebody who's come in and they they mainly they want wine and they're looking for some good food but they have somebody coming over who's maybe you know a martini drinker you know and so you want to be able  for them if they just want to grab a bottle of vodka you have it there and began to study huge selection but you have you know ten to fifteen different vikas to choose from and then you don't have to go to a different store so it's you try to make it one stop shopping as is often as we can use local producers we well because there's just some amazing things that they do and i just i think it's important to support the local economy so so yeah  let's see what we cover the deli i mean delis the nearest thing that we have a reputation for wine so that's you know again i think the important thing for viewers to know is that you know we make it our  you here we are in here it's a great great great town and the whole surrounding area just seems like people get what we're trying to do and we have a lot of fun without us to mars great well thank you and good evening