Above, Sinclair at the store in 2024. (Photos: Latoya Lindsay via Facebook/ Kylie Volavongsa).
Toni Sinclair’s journey brought her from Toronto to Forest Hills, where she’s been dispensing both wine and knowledge for the past 12 years
BY KYLIE VOLAVONGSA | news@queensledger.com
FOREST HILLS — If you’re looking for a bottle at the Wine Room of Forest Hills with no criteria but a cute label, owner Toni Sinclair will school you without hesitation.
But not before she greets you with a “welcome in, Sunshine,” and you find yourself surrounded by shelves stacked high with bottles of various regions and price points. There aren’t any rambling sommelier blurbs either, let alone a bottle of Barefoot or Josh — only a line of little flags showing the wines’ countries of origin.
Sinclair opened the Wine Room with her husband Donovan in 2014. Except she didn’t think her business would be a liquor store, never mind one in New York. Sinclair hails from Toronto with a background in finance. She doesn’t even consider herself a drinker. “I’ll be on the floor if I have one cocktail,” Sinclair said.
What led her to the Wine Room was a series of back-and-forth and happenstance, when Donovan — who grew up on the island of Jamaica — dreamed of opening a restaurant in the city.
“I was like, ‘hell no, that’s not happening.’ You start at five, and at the end of the day, you’re throwing away food. I’m not doing that.” And don’t get her started on the industry’s return on investment.
He suggested a liquor store. She disagreed again.
“Coming from Toronto, we used to go to the Bronx all the time, and it was always a bulletproof store. And I said, ‘I’m not coming to New York to lose my life,’” Sinclair said.
“You figure it out, then,” Donovan had said. So she did.
Sinclair went online and found a small building in Forest Hills, one that feels bigger on the inside and looks, according to her, like you’ve walked into Italy. Without stepping foot inside, it felt like home somehow. And even then, she still wasn’t a wine person yet.
These days, though, Sinclair knows her stuff — down to the taste of the soil.
The grapes in Greece tend to grow on volcanic soil, Sinclair explained, which means acidity and minerals that create a more savory taste. Australian wines often come from grounds rich with red clay, which retains water well and makes for full-bodied wines rife with dry, mouth-puckering tannins. Neither are for beginners, she said.
But a light red from Beaujolais, Sinclair continued, is perfect for training the palette (her other advice: if you start heavy, you can’t appreciate the full spectrum of flavors).
It isn’t that Sinclair’s being a gatekeeper or a snob. It’s that she’s interested in opening the door to the world of wine, where words like “terroir” and “minerality” don’t lose you right away.
After all, Sinclair was the same when the store first opened. And soon, she’s starting her own wine classes, where she’ll share the culmination of the last twelve years running the Wine Room and differentiating the countless bottles sampled from her suppliers.
The point of the store is to make wine make sense, and if it already does, then to make a fair introduction to something new. That one-on-one specificity isn’t built for the kind of virality as received by the neighboring Masani Pizza during the US Open — an aspect on which Sinclair prides herself. If you want something but aren’t sure what, she’ll take the time to pick your brain, then retrieve the exact bottle (or two) for you to try.
“I think we need to go back to those days where people went into little shops and got to know the shop owners, and the owners got to know the customers. That little connection isn’t there anymore,” she explained.
Sinclair also launched a cocktail station at the center of the store. There, visitors can write down their favorite recipes, and she’ll stock as many components as she can — if she doesn’t already have them.
“I don’t believe in filling a spot [on the shelf] because it’s empty. I want to fill a spot with the right thing. We’re trying to transition into a more boutique-y store, especially on the spirit side,” Sinclair said. “I don’t carry the big commercial brands. Right now, there’s a lot of holes in my inventory, but they’re purposefully there because I don’t want to put every and anything there.”
“One bottle, one thousand stories,” she likes to say. Grapes, soil, customers, and all.
The Wine Room is located at 96-09 69th Ave and is open Tuesday through Sunday.
