If you care about wine and want to drink better and more confidently, the best thing you can do is cultivate a close relationship with a good wine shop. I have been making this case for years without ever addressing the obvious question: How do you know if a wine shop is good?

The answer seems equally obvious: Good wine shops offer a great assortment of distinctive bottles. But that doesn’t help if examining a selection of wines is baffling rather than revealing.

Institutions like Chambers Street Wines, Flatiron Wines & Spirits and Crush Wine & Spirits in New York are great for expert and novice alike, and they serve a nationwide clientele. But customers who cannot confidently scan a website or who don’t buy in quantity must visit a store.

You can tell a lot about a shop simply by walking through the door, even if you don’t know much about wine. For example, what’s the temperature? Moore Brothers Wine Company near Gramercy Park keeps the store at cellar temperature, 56 degrees, which is great but not entirely necessary as long as a shop is not warm.