For Kathleen Foley, owner of the seven-month-old shop Wine Crier, inspiration came in the form of a bottle of wine she received 14 years ago. A 1978 Chateau Lynch-Bages, to be exact. “The owner of my company gave a bottle to everyone as a way to celebrate a good year,” she recalls. “It was like drinking velvet….I said right then and there I wanted to go to school to learn more.”
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After a shoot in Los Angeles in 1990, she went to Napa Valley for a weekend with some friends. The wineries there reinforced her “passion to do something new, that I didn’t know enough about,” Foley says. “I could open and close a commercial in three weeks, but the wine business, there is so much more to know, it’s never ending.” In 1993 she enrolled in her first class at the Chicago Wine School, where founder and instructor Patrick Fegan became a strong influence. “He has such a great approach to teaching,” says Foley. “The way he combined the teaching of wine with the country’s own history…the way that land, climate, and soil affect the grapes. He gave us lots of historical references. I minored in history, and liked learning about the people who tended the vines.”
“I traveled everywhere, asking questions and learning as much as I could,” she recalls. The high point was a week in London, where she visited the city’s “top ten” wine stores, interviewing the owners and taking pictures. She also visited wineries in Oregon, the Bordeaux and Champagne regions in France, and the Piedmont and Tuscany regions in Italy. Between trips she began looking for the right retail space in Chicago. “It was just like my old job–location scouting, running the numbers. It took me a while before the right deal came up.” Permits proved to be elusive in Lakeview, and parking was too scarce in Wicker Park. Then Foley heard the Travelworks store on Clybourn wanted to downsize, and she struck a deal. She got a lease for 1,400 square feet in the coveted 60614 zip code.
