Wine Crate opens in downtown Hanover

“We’ve got­ten a nice re­ac­tion,” Matt Pomerville, co-owner of The Wine Crate, said after his first week in busi­ness. “It’s a nice sur­prise be­cause peo­ple are en­thu­si­as­tic about the whole ven­ture.”

He hopes to cre­ate an invit­ing at­mos­phere where vis­i­tors can com­fort­ably shop for wine and ask ques­tions. The cozy base­ment space below Mai Tai feels ap­pro­pri­ately like a wine cel­lar and lends it­self to re­laxed brows­ing with a se­lec­tion that doesn't feel over­whelm­ing while of­fer­ing plenty of op­tions.

Pomerville has al­ready been in­un­dated with pro­pos­als for joint events with other local busi­nesses and tast­ings for stu­dent groups. He was even ap­proached by a group of Tuck stu­dents look­ing to run a mock ad cam­paign for the store.

Pomerville said he had not ex­pected stu­dents to make up a major part of his mar­ket but has been pleas­antly sur­prised by the num­ber who have vis­ited the store. With a large se­lec­tion of wines under $20, Pomerville hopes he can con­tinue to at­tract stu­dents.

He made sev­eral sug­ges­tions of rea­son­ably priced wines for stu­dents, who might be new to choos­ing wines, to try out.

For white wine:

Il Cav­a­liere (Pino Gri­gio), $13

Bigvine (Chardon­nay), $16

For red wine:

Lo­brujo Gar­nacha (Grenache), $12

Klinker Brick (Zin­fan­del), $19

The Wine Crate will host be­gin­ner wine classes, start­ing next Mon­day, No­vem­ber 7 at 7 p.m. (sign-up on­line) and free tast­ings on Thurs­days, from 4-7 pm and Sat­ur­days, from 1-4 pm.

It is a promis­ing start for The Wine Crate and Pomerville still seems in elated that his idea is ma­te­ri­al­iz­ing after nearly a year of plan­ning.