It’s easy to miss the tiny wine shop that recently opened on Broadway at 80th Street directly across from Zabar’s. That shop — the second Best Cellars in the city — is heir to a big concept, one that is still fresh and viable 10 years after it was introduced in the original shop on Lexington Avenue. For the first time, wine shoppers were no longer forced to ponder endless confusing labels or to rely on the sometimes inaccurate advice of a salesperson. Best Cellars encouraged even neophytes to take control of their wine-buying decisions by grouping just 150 carefully selected wines according to eight color-coded styles rather than by origin: fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big, and sweet.

Paired with these descriptors are breezy, often funny shelf-talkers written by the co-founder and wine director of Best Cellars, Josh Wesson, who opened the shop with lawyer Richard Marmet. While conventional shop prices go from low to high, Best Cellars keeps most wines priced under $15, and a 10 spot will still get you some change for bottles that outperform their price point.

Why did it take so long for the city to get a second Best Cellars? State regulations still forbid more than one bottle shop per owner, but it’s helped to have “a more liberal regulatory environment,” Mr. Wesson said in an interview last week. The new shop, which repeats John Rockwell’s brightly elegant design that served the original shop so well, operates as a Best Cellars licensee. It’s owned by Mr. Wesson’s best friend, Andrew Feldman, a sports medicine physician.

Regulatory constraints never did totally tether Mr. Wesson. Best Cellars shops have spread to Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Mr. Wesson also selects wines for JetBlue’s in-flight service and offers Web-based wine delivery for FreshDirect customers. Mr. Wesson is now in the throes of matching specific wines to FreshDirect’s line of ready-prepared dinners. He’s a tough judge: Of 30 white wines first tasted for the project, not one was acceptable to him. A second batch of 30 whites, tasted last week at the Best Cellars corporate office on Varick Street, did produce a handful that passed muster. As always, Mr. Wesson remains true to well made, sharply priced wines — credentials be damned. His current, beautifully pure, single-serve selections for Jet-Blue are simply called Just Merlot and Just Sauvignon Blanc.

By rights, Mr. Wesson wasn’t destined to become a wine democrat. His skills were honed back in the early 1980s as he proffered expensive wines at the Quilted Giraffe, an American bastion of haute cuisine, and then at the equally high-toned Hubert’s on East 22st Street. In 1984, Mr. Wesson won the title of “Best French Wine Sommelier” in an American competition sponsored by Sopexa, Food and Wines of France, an organization founded by the French Ministry of Agriculture to promote French cuisine abroad. He later tied for fourth place (with a Japanese contestant) in Sopexa’s contest for best sommelier in the world, held in Paris. At 30, he was one of the youngest competitors.

“Just coasting” after college, Mr. Wesson drifted to Cambridge, Mass., where he honed his professional wine skills at a small, ambitious new restaurant called Panache. Before a brief stint in graduate school, Mr. Wesson spent a month in Burgundy where he “got to see all those famous vineyards in all their topographical wonderment, and I really began to understand for the first time the connection between place and taste.”

In the late 1980s, Mr. Wesson and David Rosengarten, who would go on to host shows on the Food Network, wrote “Red Wine with Fish”: “The book was a taste-based treatise on matching food and wine,” Mr. Wesson said. “I already knew from my sommelier work that the easiest way to comprehend the world of wine was by being reductive in the service of deliciousness. If people said they like Bordeaux, or Burgundy, or Argentine Malbec, I realized they’re just using those names as proxies for taste, and that understanding led me to the taste-based system of classifying wines that became Best Cellars.”

Nothing comes between Best Cellars and its snobbism-free, value-first wine offerings. Well, almost nothing: Mr. Wesson now offers a select category called “Beyond the Best.” It’s currently a mere six wines, ranging from the underrated Steltzner Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($36) to the ultimate trophy champagne, Krug Grand Cuvée NV ($130). There’s no sellout here, only an acknowledgment that sometimes you do need to pay more to get more, and that special meals deserve special wines, neither of which come cheap.

“Context can be important,” Mr. Wesson said. “A $500 bottle of wine doesn’t ennoble a hamburger.”