“When you smell and taste a wine,” Betty Dunbar tells me, a few days before the veteran winemonger opened Laplace Wine Bar & Shop, “it should grab your attention and make you feel like you are in another place.”
For Dunbar, that other place is often France, where she was wooed into a love affair with Burgundy and discovered the well-priced treasures of Languedoc and Roussillon more than 20 years ago, before any of those regions achieved the mainstream acclaim they enjoy today. But that place can also be Santa Barbara wine country, which Dunbar was exploring by the early 1980s, when she worked for the Liquor Barn in Thousand Oaks. Along the way, she sold wine for the Henry Wine Group, worked most every winemaking/growing/marketing/managing job for The Brander Vineyard, ran her own import company called Vinalia for nearly a decade, opened Wine + Beer in the S.B. Public Market, and worked for The Winehound as well.
All of those experiences and many more come together at Laplace, which Dunbar and her business partner, Dennis Peterson, opened in the Funk Zone a few weeks ago. The bar offers 24 wines by the glass, a number of beers on draft and in bottle, and a range of small foodstuffs, such as packed sardines and cheese plates. The bottle shop, meanwhile, carries about 250 wines priced from $10 to $400, with about 60 percent imports and 40 percent West Coast.