Norwich Wines and Spirits closing down, issues last call to buy alcohol

NORWICH — Peter Rutledge was a couple years out of Dartmouth College as a philosophy major and working as bartender at Simon Pearce Restaurant when he had a dining experience that was to set the course of his life.

At dinner with his boss, Andy Fallen, Fallen asked Rutledge what he wanted to have to drink with his steak au poivre. Rutledge said he was “inclined to have a beer” when Fallen recommended Rutledge go with a glass of wine instead.

“He poured me a glass of red wine, a Bordeaux, I don’t remember which one specifically,” Rutledge recalled on a sunny summer Thursday morning sitting at a table outside Norwich Wines and Spirits, the store he has owned and run for 26 years and a destination for the casual swiller and oenophile alike.

Rutledge took a sip and tried to smile.

The initial taste was “really harsh and nasty,” Rutledge confessed, a sensation his mouth “was not enjoying at all.”

Fallen then suggested that Rutledge “ ‘take a bite of the steak with the pepper sauce and while you have that in your mouth take another sip of the wine,’ ” Rutledge recalled. “I did. And I went, ‘Wow, so that’s what food and wine pairing is, man, there is really something to this.’ ”

Thus began a more than three-decade journey for Rutledge through the rows of the wine business, beginning with working at a California winery for a few years in the early 1990s before moving back to the Upper Valley and settling in Norwich, where one day he walked into the local liquor store, the Jug Store, inquiring about a job, got hired and then later bought it, rechristening it as Norwich Wines and Spirits.

“I would call people and say, ‘This is Peter at the Jug Store and your wine is in.’ And they always thought I was saying ‘the drug store’ and I was calling from the pharmacy. So when I took it over I said I got to come up with a better name than the ‘Jug Store,’ ” Rutledge explained.

Now, after guiding countless customers through vintages, varietals and fancy distilled spirits, Rutledge is closing up shop. It’s a decision that he said he wrestled with but, after putting in seven hours standing behind the counter — not to mention extra hours before and after stocking shelves and doing paperwork — six days per week year in and year out, he wants to take a break. Then he’ll decide what’s next.

“Having entered into parenthood later in life than many, my priorities now involve being with my wife and kids, my parents, and those for whom I have not found enough time for the past three decades,” Rutledge, 57, the father of a 3-year-old boy and “almost” 7-year-old daughter, wrote when he broke the news earlier this month in the community newsletter Norwich Times.

“I got a late start in life,” he reflected on Thursday. “But life is rich.”

But, he added, “this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really take a year off.”

In an era of utilitarian box superstores, online wine clubs and wine sold in snap-top cans and milk cartons, Rutledge’s personal purveyor approach — except for an occasionally updated Facebook page the store doesn’t even have a website — made him more than a mere shopkeeper.

“He’s one of the last knowledgeable people around about wine,” said Warren Johnston, a former Valley News journalist and wine columnist. “He’s worked in vineyards, he’s taught wine classes at Osher. There’s just nobody else around like him where you can walk in and say, ‘I’m having this and I’m looking for …’ or ‘I have a friend who really knows their wine but I don’t want to overspend and what would impress them?’ ”

“He knows,” said Johnston, who noted that Rutledge’s encyclopedic knowledge of wines enabled him to have on hand a crate of under $10-a-bottle wines that were every bit as enjoyable to drink as pricier products.

Norwich Wine and Spirit’s last day is June 30, and Rutledge is working on “selling down” his inventory of “probably 600 different” wines packed into his store of 800 square feet. Rutledge said he’s “talking with several people” about handing off the business — he said he won’t even seek any payment, “I’ll give it to them” — but in any case he fully intends to leave it all behind.

“I need to make a clean break. I don’t want to be the transition guy here helping somebody get it all set up,” he said. He’s looking for “somebody else with a vision of what the store should be” who’s ready to “rock it.”

Despite “spirits” in the store’s name, however, liquor sales, at least under Rutledge, has never been a focus of the store’s business.

At the time Rutledge had purchased the former Jug Store, “it was a liquor store with a little bit of wine and I wanted to turn it into a wine store with a little bit of liquor. And that’s exactly what I did,” he said.

In fact, Rutledge explained, a few months ago he had decided to “stop selling liquor and just be a wine store. Then as things progressed I thought it’s just the right time for my family and for me to move on.”

Earlier this month, the Vermont Department of Liquor & Lottery posted on its website that it is “seeking interested parties in or near Norwich that may have an interest in and a suitable location to operate a State Liquor Agency,” or 802 Spirits outlet.

The state “requires at least 100 square feet of retail space and at least 75 square feet of storage space all devoted to retailing liquor, as well as adequate parking, signage, loading and unloading facilities,” the post said.

Applications were due June 16.

Rutledge kept the storefront closed for 15 months during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, taking orders over the phone and leaving customers to pick up their orders placed on a table outside the store’s doors.

“We did decent business but it was a grind. There was no joy in it,” Rutledge said.

But Rutledge said one of the best things to ever happen at his store came out of the pandemic: Catherine Johnson, a certified sommelier, who was working a desk job at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine while her husband was attending medical school here. Johnson approached him just as he was reopening the doors for in-store customers in June 2021, explaining she was “passionate about wine and wanted to get back into it.”

Rutledge credits Johnson, who recently moved to Detroit where her husband is doing his medical residency, with rejuvenating the business after the pandemic, bringing her “following” from her wine class she taught at Osher — the same one that Rutledge had previously led — and “making our wine selection much more diverse.”

What has been especially gratifying is mentoring others who have gone on to make their own mark in the wine business, Rutledge said. He cited Tenny King, who was 22 years old when he came to work at Norwich Wines and Spirits and “didn’t know a Chardonnay from Cabernet.”

King is now the beverage director and sommelier at the Pitcher Inn in Warren, Vt.

Over the years “dozens” of employees have come and gone, Rutledge said, but each change requires an investment in time and there came a limit.

”I was faced with this idea of bringing in somebody else, teach them how everything works, build up enough confidence in them so that I can leave and have a day off here and there,” he explained. “I just wasn’t up for doing that again. I’ve done it so many times.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.