Our History

The History of The Wine Shop in Albany, NY

December 5, 1933: The end of Prohibition! That evening, Morty Schwartz and his brother opened up their store on State street and received their first delivery of liquor from Canada. They sold out in two hours. A year later, they moved to our current location in Albany’s Helderberg neighborhood.


Over the decades, Morty’s passion for wine earned him many accolades and memberships in prestigious wine societies. Our store became THE place for that rare vintage or hard-to-find bottle of wine. Morty’s cellar was chock full of gems.


Along the way, Morty earned something perhaps far more valuable and long lasting than his accolades and society memberships. He earned the loyalty and unwavering support of the neighborhood’s fiercely devoted customers.

Through the Years

In 1991, after running the wine shop with Morty for many years, Jim Ryan became only the second owner since 1933. After Morty passed away, Jim continued Morty’s legacy. Jim had a collector’s mentality and a knack for buying the perfect wines that could age 20 or 30 years or more. Jim’s passion for wine, the store, and its customers have kept our store a part of the DNA of the neighborhood and the fabric of Albany.


With Jim’s passing, we are as determined as ever to honor the legacy both men have left… appreciation of fine wine and of community.


This year marks our 90th anniversary, making us the oldest operating wine shop in the area, if not New York State. Thanks to the best customers, we look forward to the next 90!

New owner ushers in 85th anniversary for Albany Wine Shop

(From the Times Union)

If the treasures of The Wine Shop were not exactly buried, they were hidden.


Customers at the shop, on a block-long commercial strip of New Scotland Avenue between Albany's two big hospitals, mostly browsed for inexpensive bottles of wine, as people have since the shop opened on Dec. 5, 1933 — the day Prohibition was repealed. While picking up their $10 to $20 bottles of wine in recent years, perhaps they peered into a few feet of shelving where dusty, 30- to 40-year-old bottles of French and Italian wine lay behind a locked grate above prices produced on an embossing-style label maker.


They didn't know — almost no one did — what was downstairs: the collected cellars of two lifetimes.


Among the troves Joe Maloney found when he first descended the cellar's stone steps was a case of 1982 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, among the most desired Burgundy wines in the world. At auction, it sold for $36,000.


Elsewhere in the basement, a crate of papers contained a wooden box with a plaid lining that coddles a bottle of Ardbeg single malt that was bottled in 1974 — after having aged 23 years in casks. Tasting that Scotch whisky, which first came came out of an Islay still 67 years ago, will cost you $4,000.


"Things like that convinced me it was the right move to buy The Wine Shop," said Maloney. A 59-year-old Voorheesville resident who spent decades as an executive chef in area hotels and conference centers, Maloney more recently managed a big wine and liquor store in a suburban shopping campus.


About a year ago, he was invited to consider taking over management of The Wine Shop, which, though beloved by neighbors and other longtime customers, had been ailing since owner Jim Ryan died in 2016. Ryan had purchased the shop in 1991 after the death of founder Morty Schwartz, who ran it for 58 years, many of them with Ryan at his side.


After the final paperwork is completed to transfer the business from Ryan's estate, Maloney will be only the third owner of The Wine Shop in 85 years.

The Wine Shop - Times Union 

A PRICELESS CHARACTER LEAVES US

Author(s): Fred LeBrun Date: April 10, 1992 Section: LOCAL

Wine was Mortie Schwartz's thing, and he knew it better and more deeply than anyone I've ever met in this city.


Beyond being a human resource, he was an Albany character on a par with the late King of the Dills, Joe Kulik of Joe's Deli fame. History we're talking here, history in a town steeped in the past in the vein of Bill Kennedy's long glance backward in "O Albany."


The day Prohibition was repealed, young Mortimer, a graduate of Albany High, opened a liquor store on New Scotland Avenue that eventually became the Wine Shop. The shop has run continuously since then, now in the capable hands of Jim Ryan, Mortie's assistant for 18 years.


But Mortie was not just another merchant who knew his wines; he was a passionate believer.

For him, great wines were endlessly fascinating, and he went all over the world to pursue that fascination. He studied them, discussed them, kept correspondence with other oenophiles and generally lived and breathed red wines for a lifetime.


A long lifetime. In a town and a region known for discounts, and hardly known for paying top dollar, Mortie Schwartz spent a lifetime drinking and selling the best. It's a credit to Mortie he got away with it.


When he was a mere tad, a character-in-training, Mortie was badminton champion of Albany County. Badminton, mind you. He was also a champion golfer later in life and an accomplished pianist and photographer, but those are of this time period. But badminton. Like ballet, batting the shuttlecock is a business of delicacy, agility and endurance. Demanding, yet genteel. A holdover from the age of slow, golden afternoons and times when people, the right people, "laid down a few good bottles."

Like Joe Kulik, Mortie was smart and knew people. Self-educated doesn't do justice to either one of them, and especially Mortie, who made education a priority for the rest of his life. He read continuously, and he traveled to the font and found out for himself. Mortie was always going to French and Italian vineyards. He knew the great winemakers personally and to his dying day at age 91, you couldn't fool Mortie Schwartz on a wine. He had a terrific nose and an encyclopedic memory.


A passion that had legs, especially for the French Bordeaux. A passion he loved to share with the deserving.


Albany restaurateur Jim Rua remembers dropping into the Wine Shop about 15 years ago to buy a special bottle for his friend and fellow chef Joe Iaia. Jim explained he wanted a showstopper. Mortie smiled his characteristic impish smirk, raised an eyebrow over thick glasses, and disappeared down in his coveted cellar.


He emerged with a dusty bottle of an exceptionally prized Bordeaux, a Chateau Margaux, 1906.

He beckoned Jim to a huge reference book he kept handy, turned to the appropriate entry. It read: "Chateau Margaux, 1906. Value: priceless."

"He told me he bought the bottle at a Heublein auction in London in 1925 for $125. That was a lot of money in 1925. Mortie sold it to me for the same price: $125. He said he greatly respected my profession and that's why he was virtually giving it away." 


Joel Spiro, a man of viniferous passions in his own right, remembers Mortie showing up at a Schenectady wine tasting at the home of Dr. Bill Wells one day with a bottle of 1900 Margaux, another priceless bottle. Mortie's birth year. The assemblage, mouths agape at what they held, toasted Mortie with the immortal.


Mortie understood theater implicitly. About a decade ago, when K- Lite radio was just getting started, the station had a delightful promotion where media members got to spend a lot of the management's money. Ric Mitchell was in charge, I remember. We dressed up in penguin suits, drove around in two limos, and had to spend $1,000 in four hours. Or else.


Unannounced, we pulled up to Mortie's shop, walked in and ordered two chilled bottles of Dom Perignon, about $75 a bottle at the time.


Unfazed, Mortie got them for us. Without batting an eye, he asked: "Do you need glasses?"


Last week, Mortie died. It was his time, and every wine, every man, has his. Goodbye, Mortie Schwartz. Your entry in the book of life is complete. It should read: priceless.

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