On my recent trip thru Minnesota, my dealer in St. Cloud was telling me about a wine place in called Westside Liquor. Knowing my love for wine, good beer and great Scotch, he told me I had to check the place out.
Bob Feuling gave up the life of being a dairy farmer and selling dairy equipment in the late 70's. With his wife, Linda, they bought a small bar called the West Side Bar in Little Falls, MN that included an inventory of off-sale liquor products. Bob noticed that people didn't like to come into the bar to buy liquor, so he opened an adjacent liquor store in the early 80's and he called it Westside Liquor.
Bob moved to a larger location in Little Falls in the mid 80's and then bought a spot in the St. Cloud suburb of Waite Park in 1991 and opened a second store there. Today, that location is the headquarters for the now 8 Westside Liquor locations across north central Minnesota.
I went to the one in Waite Park on the advice of my dealer (see map). It's the largest of the Westside Liquor stores (20,000 sq. ft.) and promised to have a large selection of wines and beers to choose from.
By the way, each Westside Liquor store features special lighting and cool temperatures to help keep the wine and liquors lasting longer on the shelves. Some of the workers were walking around in light-weight jackets in the store.
And the selection at Westside Liquors was impressive. There was a large area of wines from all over the world. And the prices were very good, as well. I picked up a bottle of the Ferrari-Carano 2003 Cabernet for just over $30 bucks. It's around $36 to $39 dollars back in the Quad Cities.
The beer area had a number of the typical domestics, but also had a large number beers from upper Midwest small breweries such as Summit, Capital, Schell and Lake Superior. Actually, I have a lot of beer in my garage that I have to drink up, so I didn't see anything that I absolutely needed.
But, true to what my dealer told me, Westside has a large selection of premium Scotch whiskys (he's a BIG Scotch aficionado with over 25 bottles of premium Scotch in his bar at home). Once again, I found myself drooling over some of the 18 and 25 year varieties, but couldn't bring myself to buying anything more at this time.
The prices were good, the selection was impressive, the presentation was excellent. Westside Liquors was one of the best overall wine and liquor stores I've ever been in in the Midwest. And seeing that my dealer in St. Cloud continues to grow his business, I'm sure to be back there. But only when the weather's warm.
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