When Bud Schwarzbach took a job managing his father's store in 1958, it was supposed to be a temporary position. More than 50 years on, he's still at it at Vin Chicago. The reason the business has endured so long may be that the Schwarzbachs and their colleagues don't just taste wine, but live it, tasting hundreds of wines each month, and assessing each one’s color, aroma, flavor, body, and finish. The result is a family business big enough to buy in volume, but small and passionate enough to carefully select every single wine that comes in. To back up their recommendations and prove they can count past the single digits, the team can tell customers each bottle's score on 100-point scales from Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, or Vin Chicago's own in-house rating system.

Quality may be the most important factor the staff considers when they update their selection at stores in Chicago, Highland Park, Barrington, and Naperville. But that's not to say they ignore affordability. Case in point: each store stocks a selection of sub-$10 wines that have all earned scores above 90.