This S.F. wine shop is slashing prices. Here's the catch

San Francisco Chronicle​

08-05-2025

A San Francisco wine shop is selling wines at a phenomenal discount, but caveat emptor. They may be extremely funky.
Near the entrance of Little Vine, a shop in North Beach, sits an eclectic collection of natural wines like Piedmont's Cascina degli Ulivi and the Roussillon's Domaine de Majas that owner Jay Esopenko has deemed 'too natty.' Esopenko has marked the bottles from as high as $65 down to $15 or less because he believes these wines might be flawed. Whether riddled with volatile acidity, mouse, excessive brettanomyces or some unknowable symphony of bacteria, these are not wines that Esopenko felt comfortable selling at full price to his customers.
This natty inventory problem arose after the recent departure of Little Vine's longtime wine buyer, who will remain anonymous in this column. 'He had such a high tolerance for flaws,' said Esopenko, who also owns the Russian Hill wine bar Union Larder. 'But he was really passionate about them. He could hand-sell these wines that he loved.'
When that employee left, Esopenko took over the wine buying along with another employee, Alicia Hentemann. As they started to taste some of the bottles in the shop, they grew concerned. A bottle of Movia Modri Pinot Noir, from Slovenia, 'was just not right in my opinion,' he said. 'And it's on the shelf for $65.'
Yet he knew that funky, even flawed wines have their fans in San Francisco, and that he might be able to make some natural wine lovers very happy. As soon as he marked down the Modri to $15, he sold his remaining 10 bottles within 24 hours.
Esopenko discovered that the Domaine de Majas rosé suffered from bottle variation: Some bottles tasted good, some were objectionable. He slashed its price from about $20 to $5. 'At $5, it's your gamble,' he said. Luckily, some folks seem to have gotten good bottles and have returned to buy more.
This isn't the first time Little Vine has broken out the discount bin. The shop usually offers a $15 section in early January, as a way of clearing out the previous year's inventory. Wines whose labels have been torn, whites or rosés that have likely passed their prime, or a bottle that just never sold — 'it cleans the slate for me,' Esopenko said.
To be clear, Esopenko likes natural wine. When he opened Little Vine in 2012, he was stocking minimally manipulated wines from importers like Selection Massale that were radical for San Francisco at the time. Everything he sells at Little Vine and Union Larder, he said, are 'handmade and low-intervention.' He simply cannot abide the extreme flaws.
'I don't want to sound old, but I just don't get it,' he said. 'I love the wildness of good natural wine. But if something obviously has some problems, I just can't overlook that.'