When Talitha Whidbee, pregnant with her first child, moved from the Lower East Side to Long Island City, Queens, three years ago, she found nowhere in her modest new neighborhood to buy a really good cup of coffee. That was an untenable situation for a person born in the latte epicenter of Seattle. So Ms. Whidbee, then 30 years old, opened Ten63, her own coffee shop at 10-63 Jackson Ave., half a block from the entrance to the Pulaski Bridge. Now she and her neighbors fuel up in the morning with Essse Caffe, an Italian-roasted brand also favored by superchef Mario Batali. “We get people who walk across the bridge from Greenpoint to have their morning coffee here,” Ms. Whidbee said.

But the entrepreneurial young mother felt yet another local deficiency as critical as the lack of good coffee: There was no place in the neighborhood to get a really interesting bottle of wine. So last month, Ms. Whidbee opened Vine Wine, a friendly, somewhat quirky wine source located two blocks from her coffee shop and six blocks from her garden apartment. “I was tired of bad wine,” she said, “so starting my own wine shop was a pretty straight-ahead decision.” Now Greenpointers have started walking across the bridge for wine, too.

Located on the ground floor of an old redbrick townhouse formerly used for storage, Vine Wine has a soon-to-be replaced windowless metal door and no sign out front. I would have walked right by the shop last Friday if not for a blackboard on the sidewalk listing sipping suggestions to celebrate Lance Armstrong’s impending triumph in the Tour de France. Included were both American and French bubbly and even Italian Prosecco, in honor of Ivan Basso, who could be the next champ.

Within, Vine Wine is clean-lined but quirky, with panels of speakeasy-style red-velvet wallpaper alternating with brick and wood. Beneath a crystal chandelier at the rear of the shop is a winetasting counter made from old planks by Ms. Whidbee’s husband, Monte Antrim, an architect. Behind the sales counter is a battered yellow metal stool identical to one in the kitchen of my long ago boyhood. In the restroom, there’s a potty seat and a stack of picture books for the couple’s daughter, Sadie, now 2 1/2.

Vine Wine is at the leading edge of an outer-borough insurgency of recently opened, boutique-like wine shops, scattered first across Brooklyn and now gaining a foothold in Queens. Many, if not most, are owned by women, and they differ in several ways from an earlier generation of “bottle shops.” Liquor is de-emphasized or, as at Vine Wine, banished altogether. And standard “brand-name” wines take a backseat to what Ms. Whidbee calls “smaller vineyard, esoteric, low-publicity wines.” Every wine in the shop has been proprietor-tasted and includes a handwritten tasting note. For Castle Rock Pinot Noir, Monterey County, 2004 ($10.95), for example, the note says, “Clint Eastwood may not be the mayor, but the wine is still excellent. Silky, spicy, plummy, and not featured in ‘Sideways.'”

At first, as a load of wines were delivered all at once to stock the shop, endless note-writing was drudgery. Now that new wines are added at a manageable rate, “it’s fun writing the notes,” Ms. Whidbee said. She plans to build her current selection of 115 different wines to about 240. Before Vine Wine, Ms. Whidbee had no previous wine-shop experience, but as a young restaurant manager in Seattle, she’d “bought wines for the lower half of the wine list – everything under $28.”

No single wine-growing nation gets favored treatment from Ms. Whidbee at Vine Wine. Most prominently displayed during my visit last Friday was a trio of half, full, and 1.5-liter bottles of an Austrian white, Wimmer-Czerny’s “Frumberg” Gruner Veltliner – hardly a mainstream wine, and hardly bargain-priced at $13.95 for the half-bottle that I bought. When I asked if it a double-size bottle of Gruner Veltliner at $48 might not be a hard sell in her modest neighborhood, Ms. Whidbee shrugged and said, “I just sold a bottle last evening. A man came in and said that he wanted to bring a sexy wine to his weekend hosts at the beach. I told him that a big bottle of this Gruner Veltliner was very sexy, and he went with it.”

Ms. Whidbee says she was “always interested in weird, esoteric wines like Viognier.” But she respects customers with more mainstream tastes as well. So while you can’t buy a mass-market seller such as Sutter Home white zinfandel at Vine Wine, you can be introduced to the little-known Hook & Ladder white zinfandel ($9.95) from the prestigious Russian River Valley. “It’s a terrific wine, almost dry, with strawberry flavor and a bit of pepper in the finish,” Ms. Whidbee said. “A great thing about owning a wine store is that I can recommend wines like a white zinfandel that is unexpectedly special.”

Vine Wine, 1209 Jackson Ave., Long Island City, 718-433-2611. Near the Vernon/Jackson station on the no. 7 subway line (first stop in Queens). Tuesday-Saturday, noon-10 p.m., Sunday, noon-7 p.m. Free tasting every Wednesday.

RECOMMENDED WINES AT VINE WINE

SAVIGNY-LES-BEAUNE “VIEILLES VIGNES” 2003, DOMAINE PHILIPPE GIRARD ($19.95) Wines from this good but not prestigious appellation are typically light-bodied. Before tasting this example, I worried that the sizzling summer of 2003 might have roasted it to unaccustomed heaviness. Happily, it stayed graceful, even with a core of confectionary raspberry fruit, balanced by just a touch of earthiness. In Burgundy, $20 rarely gets you so much pleasure.

PRIEURE SAINT-HYPPOLITE ROSE, 2004, COTEAUX DU LANGUEDOC ($12.50) “It’s one of those crisp, magic French wines that just goes down,” Ms. Whidbee said of her favorite summer rose. “Just be aware that you may accidentally drink the whole bottle.” A 50/50 blend of juicy grenache and strength-giving syrah.

WIMMER-CZERNY “FUMBERG” GRUNER VELTLINER 2003 ($13.95) Tempting as it is to compare a wine like this to German riesling, Gruner Veltliner is another, more muscular animal: full-bodied but not fat, forceful, with an herbal and pepper edge all its own. This was a surprisingly supportive partner to a dish of garlicky tempeh.