I just came back from visiting Marcus Ford down at his new wine shop, The Wine Way. It's lovely, and, shocker, a real wine store. Wine people in Shanghai know Marcus from his ten years as the go-to wine guy at M on the Bund. He's pretty passionate about the stuff, and between his place, and Globus, Ferguson Lane is becoming quite the specialist wine destination.

The store is centered around two Enomatic wine storage/dispensing machines, which keep open bottles fresh through the combined power of air pressure, gas exchange, and magic. Result? There's a constant sixteen bottles available for tasting in small, medium, and large tastings, with prices going from around 7 or 8rmb for a small tasting of a nice entry-level wine, up to a few hundred for a larger tasting of the more specialized, only-a-few-hundred-cases-per-year-type-stuff. You buy a membership card for a hundred kuai, and then add credit to it, like an arcade, before heading over to the Enomatic and claiming your prize. It's fun; the machine is like a fast-food soda dispenser, with its S, M, L buttons, though it's probably not kosher to point that out.

There's a few other perks to dishing out for the membership -- use of the roof terrace, an intimate, upstairs tasting room, and ten percent off your purchases. And, of course, there's a wide range of wines across the 400 or so (and climbing) bottles, from 70rmb weekday stuff all the way up. In Shanghai's growing infatuation with wine -- it sometimes seems like it's a race between wine stores and Kedi for complete blanketization of the city -- details like selection and knowledge often fall by the wayside, so it's nice to see Marcus bringing his talents from the restaurant world to the retail world. Good stuff. Check it out. Details here.