A Girl Walks Into A Bar

At Whole Foods, drinking and shopping make for most unique trip, bar none

Photos by Aubrey Edwards for AA-S Top: See something you like? Middle: Buy it and someone will open it. Bottom: Laura Carpenter pours a couple glasses of wine for tasting while shopping.

I've taken visiting poets for gelato to the new Whole Foods. I've even stopped in for a fish taco with mango salsa. But ever since I saw a man with an open beer in hand and a basketful of organic veggies, I've been dying to try shopping with booze.

Sipping a $7.50 glass of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne, purchased at the salad station and served in a plastic cup, I picked up my green basket and began. I'd already done big food shopping that week; I didn't need food. This shopping was about pleasure. Bubbly in hand, I browsed the red peppers, peered at the fresh fish, thumped sundry melons, asked questions of the staff. ("But do you have bone-in, skin-on organic chicken breasts?") I squealed through the pastry section, inhaled my way through the bread area, and drooled through the chocolate area, and only put in my basket those things that most struck me.

And all the while I felt like girl gone wild, as if I were tipsy in math class. Shopping on champagne was as strange as seeing a teacher at the gym or one of my students at the bar. Everything felt ever so slightly out of whack. When those alcoholic bubbles entered my bloodstream, I continued to examine lettuce and yet felt secretly wild -- like wearing terrific underwear under old jeans and a T-shirt. Once, years ago, during the week my father made my brother and me paint the house, we spent an afternoon sipping our "Cokes" and laughing. As if we'd pulled something off. As if doing chores with a drink or two in us made us bad kids. It was exactly like that.

But when a grocery story has actual taps for pulling beer, how can you not want to have a sip or two? At the "beer alley," a long, walk-in refrigerated enclosure with about a zillion beers (OK, 350 to 400), a tap is ready and waiting for a sampling moment (beer tastings usually happen from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays). But patrons can buy any bottle of beer and drink it while wandering. Pay for it, and they'll open it.

People also drink beer with their food; Whole Foods has lots of little islands where they'll cook for you and little tables where you can sip your beer as you eat. (A strange experience, to stare at rows and rows of food packaged to attract while you're actually consuming the food on your plate.)

The wines vary each week. Wander through the food stations and you can pick up one of three different wine menus, each with a red and white at $4.50 and a red and white at $7.50. A champagne, which also varies weekly, is served at all stations. Plus, each day a staff member chooses a wine that everyone can taste -- a veritable "wine of the day," which you can sample at any of the stations, though official wine tastings happen only between 4 and 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.

For the record, shopping and drinking don't mix. Emptying out my brown paper bag when I got home revealed the following items: Luna bars, roast beef, fat-free whole wheat honey fig bars, baby spinach, ice cream, a split of champagne. I don't even eat ice cream. And I don't like fat-free food. And I'd totally forgotten to get the chicken breasts and capers I'd gone to the store for in the first place. Meaning, of course, that I had to go back.

'A Girl Walks into a Bar ...' alternates with Jonathon Goodsell's 'Night Moves.' Please visit the 'A Girl Walks into a Bar ...' archive for more reviews. Contact Moira at bargirl@covad.net.