New York authorities are clamping down on openings of wine and liquor shops citywide — as booze sales get hammered by everything from tariffs to rising competition with marijuana, The Post has learned.
The State Liquor Authority, which controls where new stores can open, is rejecting up to 70% of license applications this year out of concern that new stores could help put existing shops out of business, according to attorneys who represent Big Apple liquor retailers.
This summer in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant enclave, Rand Liquor Store challenged a competitor’s application for a 138-square-foot shop at 296 Nostrand Ave. to reopen on its turf. The tiny store had closed in 2023 because of a dispute between its owners, according to the lawyer representing the application.
In an Aug. 6 hearing in Harlem, SLA Commissioner Lily Fan sided with Rand and clamped down on the proposal.
“The landscape has changed significantly since the prior store closed,” Fan said at the hearing. “I’m not sure that this area can justify another store.”
New York alcohol sales have plunged by as much as 25% this year, with new tariffs on imported liquor and wine threatening to compound the decline, according to New York liquor license attorney Max Bookman. That’s on top of a similar-size drop last year, he said.
“When liquor stores are forced to compete with each other like other businesses, [the fear is] they will offer alcohol at extreme discounts and turn a blind eye to underage customers,” Bookman told The Post.
Some liquor shops are making the painful calls themselves. Retailers have voluntarily “surrendered” at least 106 liquor licenses to the SLA this year, The Post found through a Freedom of Information Act request. That left 3,330 retail licenses statewide as of Aug. 25.
“More liquor stores are closing or are for sale,” liquor license attorney Robert Swetnick, who repped Rand before the SLA, told The Post. “It’s not a lucrative business like it used to be.”
Alcohol consumption has plummeted nationwide as 53% of Americans are now convinced even moderate drinking isn’t healthy versus 28% a decade ago. Wine has been particularly hard hit, as younger customers prefer spirits, beer — and increasingly, cannabis, according to research on changing consumer tastes.
Adding insult to injury, wine stores have been forced to raise prices after the Trump administration this summer imposed 15% tariffs on most European vintages.
“We have six different things working against us and tariffs are making it that much harder,” said Daniel Posner, owner of White Plains, NY-based Grapes the Wine Company.
While New York bars and restaurants can open next door to each other, wine and liquor store openings must serve the “public convenience and advantage,” according to state law. The Nostrand Avenue shop in Brooklyn was among the latest to get its license application rejected.
At the SLA’s June meeting, the authority turned down Kosher Corks’ bid to open a store in Fresh Meadows, Queens, which would have competed against A to Z Liquors across the street, at 185-11 Union Turnpike.
In February, the agency blocked another store, 5th Ave. Wines & Liquors, from relocating just one block closer to a competitor — Red’s Wine & Spirits at 7516 5th Ave. in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Commissioner Fan pointed out that Red’s sales records showed that it made $34,000 less in 2024 than it did the year before.
Global demand for wine is estimated to be at its lowest level since 1961, according to the International Organization of Vine and Wine.
US wine sales were down 8.7% during the first half of the year, according to an August report from Wine & Spirits Wholesalers. Demand for spirits fell 6% by volume during the same period, while beer consumption fell 0.8%, according to NIQ data.
Winfield-Flynn Wine & Spirits, an icon in Murray Hill, Manhattan, quietly shut its doors several months ago after 74 years. A major distributor had sued it for $100,000 in unpaid bills. Wine Geeks in Armonk, NY, shuttered its doors in March after 15 years.
“Our business and the entire industry has been in decline since Covid,” owners Derek and Carol Todd said in a YouTube video at the time.
Other stores are pivoting towards less expensive bottles to keep sales flowing. Sip NYC on Manhattan’s Upper East Side ran a 25%-off sale on pricey Burgundy wines that had been gathering dust on the shelves, its owner Justin Loeb told The Post.
The sale moved $20,000 worth of Burgundy — although it was no bonanza, he said.
“We basically didn’t make a profit on our Burgundy and I’m putting that money [from the sale] towards other products that cost less,” he explained.
Now it’s discounting pricey Italian wines, offering a 2018 Uccelliera Brunello Di Montalcino for $56.24 — down from $75 — and a 2018 Syrah, Tua Rita Keir Toscana, for $104 from $140.
“We saw the same situation during the recession of 2008 and 2009, but people were drinking more then,” said Loeb.
Loeb is using the revenue from those sales to stock his shelves with more common, “name-brand stuff” including Josh Cellars wine, he said. Grapes The Wine Company is also cutting back on pricey vino.
“Hundred-dollar-plus bottles are dead and no one is buying $50 cabs,” Posner said, using the nickname for cabernet sauvignon wines.
His store, which is known for high-end French vintages, has doubled its stock of bottles costing $25 or less.
“Wine is not cool anymore,” Posner said. “When are we going to make wine great again?”
