Matt Dolan, the wine steward at the Rocket Market, leads ongoing wine classes. young kwak photo
School of Booze New state laws and growth in craft brewing and winemaking mean there’s a lot to learn By Chey Scott
T
he room looks just like a college lecture hall that’s been set up for an exam, except for the sets of empty wine glasses placed at each seat, along with pens, bottled water and class workbooks. Long, narrow tables are set up in rows of six with a wide aisle down the middle, and an overhead projection screen at the front of the room glows white with the title of the class: “What’s Your Beer Style?” It’s an undergrad’s dream course, but this isn’t a university. It’s a room at Total Wine & More, a warehouse-style adultbeverage purveyor. It’s been almost a year since the voter-approved changes on the sales of spirits were enacted in Washington. While those changes didn’t turn out the way many people expected,
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(additional taxes made spirits pricier overall) most noticeably, hard liquor became easier to buy, popping up on the shelves of grocery stores and some local beer and wine specialty stores. Big-box retailers also rushed in to take advantage of the new rules, Maryland-based Total Wine & More among them. When the national company opened its new booze megastore in North Spokane last November, the ability to become better educated about what’s in your stemmed glass or beer stein also grew. Leading up to Washington’s privatization of spirits sales, and continuing still, has also been a growing interest in the craft beer brewing movement, as the number of breweries both nationally and statewide has dramatically increased in the past
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