17 Oct Liquor Stores We Rely On: Potomac Wine and Spirits

Liquor Stores We Rely On: Potomac Wine and Spirits

We write all the time about the bottles we buy, what we think of them, and what we make with them. Every once in a while we give a little credit to the liquor stores where we find those bottles.

Profile of a Liquor Store: Potomac Wine and Spirits

Class of Store: Scouting Party

Location: M Street in Georgetown

Best Feature: a priority on featuring spirits from places other than the US, Italy, and France

Best Buy: St. Raphael Quinquina

Weakness: We’ve yet to discover one. We could complain that they’re in Georgetown and we’re in Capitol Hill and it’s a bit of a trek, but that probably just goes to show you how much we like them.

From the outside, Potomac Wine and Spirits is an unassuming corner liquor store, but step inside and you’ll see this isn’t your run of the mill place. It’s a small store, but luckily it has high ceilings; and their floor to ceiling shelves are busting full of interesting bottles. They have the basics covered, but where they really excel is in giving premium shelf space to bottles you’ve probably never heard of–or, even better, bottles you look for everywhere and can never find. An excellent example of what we call the Scouting Party style liquor store, Potomac is our favorite place to buy liquor in DC, by a mile.

We literally couldn’t do what we do without Potomac’s help. When we needed Croatian brandy for our party at the Croatian Embassy, Potomac had several to choose from. When we were trying to replicate the Improved Shochu, the rare drink for which we didn’t possess any of the ingredients, Potomac had the bison grass vodka and shochu in stock, and were able to find us the rarest of them all, a Douglas fir liqueur. When we wanted to know if the obscure Indian rum Old Monk made a significant difference in the 1919, we turned to Potomac. Sure enough, they had a dusty bottle of it high up on one of the shelves (The verdict, by the way: an interesting rum, but not essential to a good 1919). Would you like to try one of those excellent, hard to find Spanish vermouths we are always talking about? You should make your way to Potomac.

With all of our crazy requests, we’ve never stumped them yet. And whenever we’re in the mood to try something new–maybe even something we didn’t know existed–we make a little pilgrimage across town to Georgetown.