Creating a
Destination
Store
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SCOTT ERB
Consumers travel from surrounding states
to visit Julio's Liquors, in Westborough,
MA, which offers wide selections of wine,
beer and spirits, great service, and an
array of extra features that makes shopping
an exciting and fun experience.
By Gerry Khermouch
O
Julio's Liquors
owner Ryan
Maloney has seen
the store grow from
his father's 1,000square-foot grocery
store to the current
36,000-square-foot
beverage alcohol
emporium.
n a desultory Saturday morning near
Boston in mid-August, Randall Bird
is easing into his account of how he'd
recently gotten thrown out of a pancake joint on Cape Cod after his
overheard comment that a short stack
billed as "savory" was actually "sweet" had provoked a
fight with the chef. "He comes out to confront me
because he thinks I have a problem with his cooking,
but the problem is with the menu writing," Bird
recounts, as his broadcast partner Ryan Maloney tries
not particularly hard to suppress his giggles. Bananas,
maple syrup and brown sugar may all be delectable,
Bird presses on, but they're not savory. So what was the
upshot? Maloney demands. "I was able to eat three or
four bites of the sweet pancake before I was removed on
a savory violation," Bird answers.
Though the familiar, bantering bond of Maloney
and Bird resembles that of another Boston-area radio
institution, the Car Talk show, this is actually "It's the
Liquor Talking," broadcast live every Saturday morning for two hours on the 50,000-watt WCRN from
Julio's Liquors in Westborough, west of Boston. And
whimsy aside, the anecdote is leading Julio's owner
Maloney and whisky authority Bird – The Spirits
Medium," as he's styled on the show – to a more serious point: many of the folks using phrases like "savory"
to describe food and beverage flavor profiles really
don't know what they're talking about. It's meant as
12 • Beverage Dynamics • www.beveragedynamics.com • September/October 2013
