Libations Wine & Beer

Reliable source for quick wine but won’t say beer: very limited in the back. Mostly wine here.
Did pick up a 6 pack for Super Bowl, Stella for $ 16. Chilled of course.
Free parking in plaza, only opened til 9pm.
Friendly service.

Totally disagree with previous poster. They have an excellent selection of fine wine which absolutely rivals Firefly. They have a very decent selection of quality beer and spirits. The great thing is that unlike some other specialty wine stores the employees are very knowledgeable without being self-​righteous about their wine knowledge.

If you take this store for what it is, instead of what you want it to be, it’s hard to find fault.
Libations has changed over the years and what you’ll find now is neighbourhood shop with a smart selection of wine and beer that outstrips the smaller government and private stores. Not a huge selection of spirits, but again the what is available goes beyond the run of the mill.
The beer selection is borderline outstanding and you can find a good to great wines at a variety of price points.
Bottom line, this is a first rate neighbourhood store.

So when Mark Anthony had that petition about six months back, asking us all to sign so they could get beer in the shop, it sounded like a great idea.
What they neglected to mention was that we were signing away the old Mark Anthony store for something worse. With the beer came a complete overhaul and renaming of the store. I don’t remember signing to approve a change to «Libations Wine & Beer,» nor do I remember voting for them to go for cheaper shelving & to cut back their decent wine selection to make way for filler product lines of cheap wine. I overheard one of the people in the shop about a month ago saying they’re affiliated with Everything Wine in North Van. Guess the Mark Anthony Group has made the decision to have all their stores carry tons of cheap crap that makes it look like their shelves are filled.
Okay, annoyance at changes aside, here’s the deal on Libations. They have some okay wines on the expensive side, mostly Aussie or BC wines. There are a couple of decent buys from Spain and Argentina. But far too much space on the cheap new shelves is taken up by filler. They love the wineries that put out full lines of wine in various price ranges. Obviously there’s lots of Mission Hill and Mission Ridge, and a bit less of some of the Vincor brands since they’re competitors. And you have to be careful that you’re buying a real BC wine, not one of the Mark Anthony wines made from cheap U.S. grapes trucked into the province.
But the big problem is that they’ve taken their philosophy on developing lines with every single possible varietal for different price points and used that to choose the rest of the non-​BC wines. For example, Germany has been putting out excellent, versatile dry rieslings over the past decade, but they don’t make much else, and there aren’t big brand names in German wine. Most wine stores in BC manage to find at least three or four decent German bottles from various producers. Libations instead opts to represent German wine by offering the Deinhard label, which apparently attempts to make and market every possible varietal for export at low price points. Over all my years in Germany I have never seen Deinhard wine sold there, except for the Deinhard Lila Sekt; I didn’t know they made wine until I went to Everything Wine and Libations.
Here’s my problem with the increase in entire lines of brand-​name wine: it tells me that they aren’t taking the time to think about or taste what they’re bringing into the store. They’re taking the lazy way out — just ordering up the entire line of the big brand names, assuming their customers are swayed by the names. They’re selling to the price point and the brand, rather than the taste of the wine.
The beer, on the other hand, isn’t bad. They don’t have tons of it (Firefly on Cambie is better), but what they do have is decent. They have the full line of Rogue from the States, plus R&B & Swan’s Buckerfields, a number of Belgians, and a handful of German beers.
But overall, Libations is not worth the trip for me anymore, even though they’re my closest wine shop and right next door to Safeway. I only stop in if I’m making chili & need a bottle of beer for the recipe. Really, Firefly and the Cambie & 41^st BC Liquor Store are not that much farther away, and they’re far better.