the Wine Shop in Toulouse celebrates its 40th anniversary
La Boutique des Vins is a family business created in 1982 by Maryse and Robert Anterrieu. Maryse is the daughter of a wine salesman from Mazamet (Tarn), Jean Pharamond. His kind takes over the business and decides to set up a shop in Toulouse, place des Carmes. Now run by Robert and Maryse’s daughter, Valérie Lecomte, 56, the store offers more than 3,000 wine references and 500 spirits.
Since 1991, Valérie Lecomte has been at the store, she took over the management in 1998 by extending the opening hours and offering delivery. “My father was a sort of visionary because in the 1980s in Toulouse, there were quite a few wine merchants. There is Bousquets, there is Bacquié, and us. And the Place des Carmes was not what it became“, explains the sommelier. Since then, the Wine Shop has had two years rich in emotions with a pre-Covid period marked by the demonstrations of yellow vests, and a Covid period on the contrary of good economic health for wine merchants, on which the profession still surfing.
We showed the public that it was better value for money to go to the wine shop rather than to the supermarket. In supermarkets, you take a wine at random at 8 euros, you can fail. This risk there in a cellar does not exist.
Valérie Lecomte is now at the head ofa team of eight people, she also manages the Boutique des Saveurs created in 1998 just next door, rue Ozenne and formerly managed by her sister Sophie. It is a delicatessen, which has been transformed to enrich the offer of La Boutique des Vins by also offering wines and spirits, beers and other gift ideas.