It only tastes expensive

Linda Linham and Ed Nicoletti were having dinner on vacation in Milan a few years ago when they tasted a wine that seemed especially good -- and especially cheap.

“It cost $2,” Linham says, “and that struck a chord with us. We’d just sold some video stores we owned in Boston, and we’d been talking about looking for a new retail business, something that we could do together ... when we moved to Los Angeles, where Ed wanted to pursue a career in the movie business.

“Since I’d always liked wine, we thought, gee, you should be able to get wines this good for reasonable prices in L.A.”

Nicoletti says that as a businessman, he’d always liked the 99-cent store concept but he realized that finding decent wine at that price wasn’t terribly likely. So he moved the decimal point one place to the right and -- bingo! -- Vineyard Express, a wine store specializing in wines at $9.99 or less, was born.

Vineyard Express is small. It carries only 100 to 140 different wines, with a total inventory of about 2,000 bottles. It’s in a mini-mall in West Los Angeles, along with a nail salon, a furniture store and a dry cleaner.

Linham, 36, is the real wine lover in the partnership. “My family always had wine on the table,” she says, “and it wasn’t long before my interest in wine became a passion. I worked as the controller in a restaurant in Boston after I graduated from college, and when the kitchen and wait staffs had regular wine tastings, I always managed to participate.”

Nicoletti, 38, enjoys wine too, but Vineyard Express seems more a business than a passion for him.

Both have a business education, though. She went to Boston University because it has a good business school. That’s where they met.

On the day in 1988 that Linham graduated, Nicoletti hired a small Cessna to fly over the ceremony trailing a banner that said: “Congratulations, Linda. PS: Marry me. Ed.”

That sort of grand gesture was what one might expect of a future filmmaker. But Linham had always been the practical, realistic sort, so as she stood on the university football field that early-summer afternoon, peering at the banner rippling in the sky, she found herself mentally paging through the school yearbook, “looking for other Eds and other Lindas and trying to figure out which ones might be coupled and whether this plane was really meant for me.”

She decided it was. They got married.

Now he’s making movies, and they’re partners in Vineyard Express -- the first of what they hope will be many such stores.

They are not the first, of course, to sell wines at prices that don’t require refinancing the family home. Trader Joe’s has long sold wine at even lower prices than Vineyard Express. But Trader Joe’s isn’t a wine store; it’s a grocery that sells wine, among many other things.

The prototype for what Linham and Nicoletti are doing may be Best Cellars in New York, which opened in 1996 with just 100 wines, none more than $10.

Best Cellars has since expanded to six stores -- adding outlets in Boston, Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C. -- and two years ago, amid skyrocketing wine prices, the stores increased their top price to $15. Each Best Cellars also has a “store-within-a-store” selling some wines for more than $15.

Vineyard Express also sells a few wines for more than their $9.99 maximum -- at prices from $11 to $30 each.

“Sometimes, I’ll taste a wine I really like that we can’t sell for $9.99, and if I like it enough, we’ll stock a small quantity of it,” Linham says. “But we never have more than 10 or 12 wines in that price range. And we have many wines under $5.”

Linham does the wine-tasting for the store, trying 20 for every one she decides to carry.

“There are a lot of good $9.99 wines, but there are even more bad ones,” she says. “I have to slog through a lot of junk, but I feel good when I realize I’m saving ... our customers from having to taste wines that could turn them off wine permanently.”

Linham’s personal touch -- and palate -- are integral to the store’s operation. “I like it when someone comes in, tells me what they’re having for dinner that night and asks what wine would go best with it,” she says.

Although Vineyard Express carries wines from all over, Linham thinks the best $9.99 quality-for-price wines come from Australia, Chile, Italy, Argentina, Spain and France.

“It’s tough to find good California wines in this category,” she says, echoing my own unhappy experience. “California wines under $10 tend to be one-note wines -- thin, with very little fruit. They taste like they don’t cost very much. What we want is wines that taste like they cost more than $9.99, not less.”

I know why high-end California wines are so expensive -- it’s everything from vineyard owners trying to satisfy their egos and recoup the cost of their land to the wines’ relative scarcity and high critics’ scores. But I’ve never been quite sure why low-end California wines are so bad. Or at least why so many of them are so inferior to their counterparts from abroad.

Although Vineyard Express carries inexpensive wines, it is not a discount store. On my first visit, I noticed the 2001 Vitiano Falesco, a modest Umbrian red that’s been our midweek house wine in the last three vintages, selling for $9.99. I’ve bought it in large, discount wine stores for $6.99 and $7.99 -- but I’ve also seen it as high as $12.99.

“We’re not a discount store,” Linham acknowledges. “We think our prices are fair, but we can’t buy in big enough quantities to cut our prices like that.”

The shop is cozy and friendly, though -- in part because service is knowledgeable and attentive and in part because Nicoletti’s design made it somewhat round in shape.

“I designed it and built it so it would sort of resemble a wine barrel,” he says.

The store opened last March, and since then, Linham and Nicoletti have started a monthly newsletter and hope to soon have a Web site (www.vineyardexpress.com). While Linham has been busy tasting, buying and selling wine, her husband has been out scouting new locations, meeting with potential investors, talking to a company about creating Vineyard Express franchises -- and working on movies. He’s written, directed and produced two low-budget films so far -- a horror movie called “A Penny for Revenge” and a drama, “The Exchange.” He says his third movie, “The Night Stalker,” will begin filming here soon.

The Nicoletti-Linham relationship is a true partnership, though. She was the production manager on “The Exchange.”

“I like movies,” she says. “They’re like wine -- a lot of fun.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.