Augusta Eats: Former wine expert at Augusta National Golf Club opens store offering bespoke wine advice

If you’re the kind of wine drinker who just zips into a store to grab a bottle for a last-minute dinner party, the Augusta Wine Co. might not be for you.

That, owner Jason Jones said, is the whole point.

“It’s private curation ... having a relationship with individuals in sourcing wine for them specifically,” he said.

Some businesses sell wine. Others store wine collections for private owners. Jones’ new business does both, and he said there are only maybe two other stores in the United States with that business model.

Jones opened the Augusta Wine Co. in October 2023 with his extensive knowledge of wine as a cornerstone. For more than eight years, Jones was the sommelier – or wine expert – at the Augusta National Golf Club. As a hospitality professional, he served and poured wine as an out-of-town temp during the 2010 and 2011 Masters Tournaments.

In December 2011, the National asked Jones to apply for a vacant sommelier job at the club. When he told the club he wasn’t a professionally trained sommelier, he was told the club would wait until he was trained. While skills can be taught, he said, maintaining expert member rapport with the world’s rich and famous requires a certain personality that the club demands.

“Being able to function in that environment and do it professionally – not starstruck, not asking for autographs – it’s really is about getting the right fit,” Jones said.

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The Augusta Wine Co. is fitted with 99 custom-built wooden lockers where wine lovers can store their most prized bottles. Jones sees the smaller lockers as the best fit for local customers. The larger lockers could be hospitality lifesavers for Masters Week.

"Currently they’re coming in and just scouring wine shops trying to get the right wines and quantities for the week. Maybe it's there, maybe it's not,” he said. “Then at the end of the week they’ve got all this alcohol wondering what to do with it.”

The wines filling the lockers will be, for now, selections purchased in the shop. Current Georgia law prohibits Jones’ business from storing wine on-premises that is bought elsewhere.

“It’s basically like a P.O. box for your wine,” Jones said. “You don’t have to come by a wine shop, or you’re not limited to what’s on a wine shop shelf to buy your wine.”

Locker owners have seven-day-a-week access to their wine through a special locked building entrance secured further with a personal numeric code.

The Augusta Wine Co. also specializes in bespoken wine tastings. Parties can sample up to six wines that can be selected based on just about any theme.

“So if someone says, ‘Hey we want a fun wine experience,’ I just choose some fun wines that fit, or it can be something really custom, where you have six people who want to try some new (cabernets),” Jones said. “If someone wants to explore a region in France, I can choose all those wines from that region.”

And Jones will be there to tell you just about everything you need to know about a particular wine – the vintage, alcohol content, acidity and even the species of oak used in building a certain wine’s aging barrel.

Perhaps most famously, a wine’s country of origin often can even be correctly narrowed to a specific region by expert sommeliers such as Jones. Education and training for sommeliers culminates in grueling final exams. Students pursuing advanced levels through the world-renowned Court of Master Sommeliers must take “the hardest tests on Earth to pass,” according to Jones.

Before thinking about a second location or franchising his locker-shop business model, Jones would rather secure more storage space in anticipation of when Georgia retools its alcohol storage laws.

Customers so far have been “really impressed,” he said. “For us to do what we want to do, the strongest driver is word of mouth, and people talking about how we’ve been able to help them, and the value they found in our process.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Former Augusta National wine expert pours his expertise into new store