• HOURS: 4pm-6:30pm Friday-Sunday; 5pm-6:30 Monday-Thursday.
• PRICES: $2 off wines by the glass; $8 off bottles.

I’m not a wine expert, but I do fancy myself something of a happy hour expert. And with $2 off every glass and $8 off every bottle, Poco Wine Room has the best wine happy hour in town.

Here’s why I’m totally enthused about that: while I’m not a true wine expert, I am a pretty serious wine student. I just love learning about it—love working on my palate, discovering scents and flavors I’ve never picked up before, love reading about growing and blending styles and touring vineyards and…all of it. I’m hooked.

It’s really hard though, and time-consuming, and slow-going, and expensive. I would compare it to learning to speak a foreign language fluently.

And by “fluently” I don’t mean being able to ask for directions or translate a billboard. I mean being able to quickly and gracefully say something complicated, or specific, or truly idiomatic—the way a native speaker would say it. That’s hard, yo. And as David Sedaris is always capturing hilariously, you have to think and say a lot of things that make you look dumb along the way. And you’ll feel dumb too, and wonder why you can’t learn faster.

And that’s what learning wine is like for me.

Anyway a big part of this whole learning about wine thing is tasting a lot of wine. But remember that thing I said about expensive? Yeah. I’ve scoured the city for great wine happy hours to offset the price. But most happy hour wine offerings amount to discounts on the house reds and white. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll drink that. But I can’t really learn much from it.

Poco is, as stated above, the exception. Plus it is a simple and sweet place—a loft that is unrelentingly modern yet still feels kind of cozy when you’re up in the corner on the mezzanine level in one of those cushy chairs. The people who run it are lovely and indulge my enthusiasm, but I’ve also seen them leave people alone graciously if the just want to drink wine, rather than know where it came from or how it was aged.

And there is nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, wrong with that.

See a complete list of great HHs here.