I was exploring the small downtown of Rangeley, Maine, on Route 4 recently. The trip was meant to be more outdoorsy (fishing, kayaking) but as it was raining and windy, spending time on the water was not desirable. So hanging around downtown it would be.

Rangeley has a quaint downtown. Too quaint for its own good it seems- there were several stores, including an old-time pharmacy, that appeared to be in working order, but were actually closed down, and it appeared that no one knew what to do with them beyond that. A book store, one bar, and a couple gift stores rounded out the street. One place caught my eye though-Wilderness Wines. Although the store was in a rather nondescript house, it had a colorful poster with its name on the front of the house, with “Home of specialty beers and ales” written on it. I was curious, especially since there wasn’t much else to see downtown.

  Inside, the shop was tiny, enough for barely 10 shoppers to fit comfortably. It had white painted tin ceilings. Unfortunately, the service was not so good. I waited a while to cash out, due to the fact that the owner must have been on an extremely important phone call; there’s only so many times you can walk back and forth across a such a small room. On display there was a decent range of Scottish, British, and German beers; a lot I’ve never seen. It had a couple of bargain bins for wines, but the prices weren’t all that great. They also had a “sparkling” bin, “easily approachable” Chilean wines bin, a section of port, and dessert wines (I saw a few Muscatels in there; maybe another time.) There was also a good selection of reds.

  The beer I picked up was organic, called Wiesen Edel-Weisse, and it’s a hefeweizen-style beer, one of my personal favorite types of beer. It’s Bavarian, produced by a brewing company founded in 1872. The owners are directly descended from the first, Georg Schneider. I found it kind of heavy, and the taste of it didn’t totally appeal to me. I like beers that are more spicy. There was a strong aftertaste as well that wasn’t entirely pleasant.

The shop was preparing for a move down the street to a bigger store, so maybe the new location will bring about an improvement in their friendliness.

The store is located at 2419 Main St., in Rangeley, Maine.

You can visit http://www.rangeleymaine.com/shops.shtml for a listing of other shops in the Rangeley area.

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