In So Cal there are a lot of great wine shops that have lots of hard-to-find wines (they won’t be at Ralphs or Albertsons), and also have wine accessories like fine stemware, books and magazines and lots of overpriced liquor. Most have a tasting bar where you can try before you buy.

Most wine shops are organized in the same way. Wines are organized by grape varietal –merlots with the merlots, chardonnays with chardonnays, and so forth. Specialty wines like dessert wines and sparkling wines have their own area. Imports are all organized by country and then by region; Italian wines like Chianti and Barolo will have their own section.

The most popular wine shops in San Diego are Wally’s Marketplace, High Times, the Wine Exchange, Vintage Wines and The Wine Bank.

Many novice wine drinkers are intimidated by wine shops. There are too many labels, a lot of foreign names, and strange people work there – I should know, because I was a strange person working at a wine shop, and the shop I worked at was The Wine Bank.

The Wine Bank is located in the Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego in the historic Brunswig Drug Building, which was built in the 1880s. The shop is deceiving: On the street level it looks like a small shop, but downstairs the place is huge, with rooms and rooms of wine. There is a champagne room, a burgundy room, and Italian room and so forth. There is also a cavernous wine bar and vaults and vault full of thousands of cases of wine.

When you go in, you’ll meet a little old man sporting a lost-in-the-’70s Fu Manchu moustache, who is 80 years old but acts half his age. He is Mike Farris, owner of The Wine Bank, and the godfather of wine. Mike’s mind has been sharpened by a million wine tastings and discussions about the juice. I have studied with a couple of masters of wine, and no one has the overall understanding of wine that he has, or his passion for it.

Mike is a Dickensian character with wealth that is beyond belief – he could have a fleet of Mercedes, but he chooses to drive a beat-up old white Ford van. He owned half a dozen liquor stores back in the ’60s and was heavily into wine. Mike sold his liquor stores, and he and his bright and handsome nephew, Bryan Farris, known as “Spider” by his surf buddies, started The Wine Bank in the late ’80s.

A typical day at The Wine Bank is a like a bowl of cereal, full of nuts, fruits and flakes.

I would welcome Mike with a bow. “Hello, welcome to your kingdom,” I would say.

He would run me over like a freight train. “Out my way,” he would say. “Get to work.”

During the weekdays, work consisted of tasting wine for close to six hours. When I tasted wine, I would take out a large Bordeaux glass, which could hold over 20 ounces of wine. I would place about two ounces in the glass and then swirl and release the aromatics of the wine. I would then sniff it, examine the color and check out the legs – which is the alcohol color separation against a white background, usually a sheet of white paper. Then I would swirl and sniff again, and then taste it. I would roll the wine in my mouth and suck in a little air, sniff out of the glass and then spit into an old champagne bucket. If I was tasting more than 10 wines, I will spit if. If tasting less than that, I would swallow.

So there I would be, down in the wine bar, waiting for the deluge of sales people, winery reps and the occasional winemaker.

After hours of twirling, swirling, sniffing, spitting and saying no to another bad $6 chardonnay, we would wait for the attack of the winos, the wine geeks and the lonely hearts. Using his spider sense, Bryan could smell a lonely heart from a hundred feet away, and would run and hide in the vault. Mike would be arguing with a wealthy customer that wanted wine sold at cost, and I would be trying to find five 93-point Parker wines for a geeked-out customer.

Bryan would re-emerge with a couple of Magnums of 1982 Mouton-Rothschild that Mike had forgotten he’d bought over 20 years ago for a hundred bucks apiece – each worth more than a couple of grand today. One time asked Mike how he gets all these hard-to-find wines from this mafia wine distributor, and he told me that he knows where all the bodies are buried.