During his career as an award-winning sommelier, Joshua Wesson always seemed to field the same, simple question from thirsty patrons -- "What does it taste like?" So in 1996, with co-founder Richard Marmet, he launched a wine store based on that very principle. The result has been a growing, nine-location chain called Best Cellars that prides itself on unpretentiousness in an industry rife with know-it-alls.

The New York-based outfit's stores now stretch as far as Texas and feature carefully selected, inexpensive varietals organized by taste. BusinessWeek Online Small Business Editor Rod Kurtz recently sat down with Wesson over a glass of pinot noir to discuss Best Cellars' growth, why appearance counts in retail, and how to open a bottle of wine if you're ever stranded on a desert island. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow:

Q: What separates Best Cellars from other retailers?
A: We wanted to create an anti-wine store -- remove every obstacle we could ever imagine people would have if they loved wine but didn't know a lot about it. Everybody knows what they like.

But most wine stores, prior to Best Cellars, were laid out by country of origin, region of origin, and/or grape type. If you think about it, the shopping experience demands a tremendous amount of prior knowledge on the part of the consumer because in order to navigate a normal wine shop, you have to know that France is divided up into different subsections, which are then divided up into further subsections, and each one of those subsections has a tradition with grapes and wine making that's different from the one next door and different from the one that's 200 miles away.

And you've got to master all of this detail in order to figure out what to have with the pizza that you're ordering, or the party that you're going to. It's insane.

Q: In addition to user-friendly stores, you've also found success with a limited selection and almost no bottles over $15. Why hadn't this approach been taken before?
A: I think that wine retailing is a cottage industry. Modern retail concepts had never been applied to it. It was a mom-and-pop business, hidebound by tradition. I mean, it really was the application of common sense in a straightforward manner that ended up producing Best Cellars. Limited selection, prices capped at an impulse purchase point, wines prescreened by an expert, wines written about in a consistent way.

And then we threw in a system based on taste -- eight taste categories. We didn't dumb it down, we just reduced it to the level where anybody could understand it -- expert, novice, somewhere in between. And we used icons and colors so people could relate.

Wine experts and wine writers have talked about the way individual wines taste for as long as there has been wine. But to use taste as an organizing principle for a store was radical. And sometimes the most radical and novel ideas are the ones that are the most commonsense based. They're hiding in plain sight.

Q: As a former sommelier, do you worry about what the purists think?
A: I never thought, even from the first day that we opened, that we were doing disservice to the wine industry. We weren't thumbing our nose at traditionalists. We weren't saying: You're wrong, we're right. We were just saying this is another way of doing it. We think that it's going to have resonance with people who like wine, and it's going to have instant appeal.

Ninety percent of the wine that's consumed in the U.S. is consumed by 10 percent of the population over 21 who drink beverage alcohol. Nobody drinks wine in this country. Why aren't they? Something is getting in their way.

Q: Aesthetics are important to your business model. Why?
A: Wine is a lifestyle-enhancing beverage. It's only consumed for one reason: To make your life better than it was before and to make the people around you funnier than they were before. And because of that, because it's so directly associated with pleasure, it seemed ill advised to create a store where the shopping experience was any less pleasurable than the experience [surrounding] the product's [consumption].

And that means creating an environment that's fun to shop in, where the information is conveyed as directly and enjoyably as possible. In fact, we look at the stores as exploratoriums, where you can learn a lot about wine just by reading each shelf. It's no coincidence that the stores have a museum-like quality to them. But the best museums are interactive and engage you. And we try to engage people to think about what they're reading, tasting, and looking at so they walk out better consumers, smarter consumers, happier consumers.

So everything in the store, from the color palette to the fixture display, to the way that our sales people are dressed, to the music that's playing -- all of those things are thought about in very careful ways to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Q: What's the biggest challenge you're facing right now?
A: The regulatory environment that we operate in. If you're opening coffee bars, you don't have to deal with the limitations on the number of units or the ownership or the distribution of product.

But when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, every state got the right to regulate beverage alcohol sales in any way that they wanted. And the end result was 50 different states doing it in 50 different ways. It's daunting. It's a barrier to entry, which is one reason why I don't think many people have tried to create legitimate chains or retail stores, let alone try to extend them nationally.

Q: What are some basic tips for wine lovers who don't know anything about wine?
A: Don't think in terms of grape. Don't think in terms of place. Don't think in terms of country. Don't think in terms of vintage. Don't even think in terms of price. Just say: "I like wines that are..." and come up with three adjectives. I like red wines that are fruity, that taste like cherries, and that are lip-smacking.

I mean, there's no right or wrong in terms of the words here. Just come up with three descriptions of that wine. And if you write them down and you give them to somebody and they know about wine -- whether the wine steward or the waiter or a person in a store -- they're going to help you find one that you're going to like. That's all you have to do. You're three words away. Game over.

Q: What about bringing wine to a holiday party? It's hard to know everyone's three adjectives.
A: There are Boutros Boutros-Ghali wines that make peace. I would say that you're on very safe ground if you're giving a bottle of sparkling wine as a gift, since everybody needs sparkling wine at some point or another in their lives. To celebrate an event or simply to have an event turn festive. And you don't need to buy champagne to get a good sparkling wine. There are outstanding sparkling wine values coming from Australia and California and Italy and Spain.

Try to give gifts that people don't have in their home. Give them something that's new, that's something they wouldn't buy for themselves.... Dessert wines are wines that people usually feel they know nothing about, they avoid. But when they have the really good ones, they flip out.

Q: And if disaster strikes? The age-old question -- what happens if you forget the corkscrew?
A: There actually is a way to get the cork out of a bottle without pushing it through. Take the bottle, and remove the foil. Then start banging it gently on a carpeted floor. What you do is create pressure, and it may take you 20 minutes to do it, but you will get the cork halfway up, and then you can pull it the rest of the way. It's a great trick.