When Erich La Sher received a telephone call explaining that some water had seeped into La Cave du Vin, the subterranean wine bar he manages, he envisioned a few puddles of the stuff here and there. He was a little off-base.

“When I walked in, the water came up to the middle of my shins,” La Sher recalls. “But you could see from the walls that the water had been as high as two feet.”

Because half of La Cave du Vin is an actual wine cellar, with racks of bottles sprouting up from the floor and encircling the room, the damage was significant. “We lost hundreds and hundreds of irreplaceable bottles of wine,” laments La Sher. “Anything that had been submerged in water, the insurance people took out back and literally smashed in the dumpster. It was like Eliot Ness enforcing the Prohibition.”

Apart from the four-week recovery period following the “Great Flood of Aught Three,” as it is now less-than-affectionately called, La Cave du Vin has been dispensing libations from beneath Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights for nearly a decade. And with upwards of 200 different varieties of beer, it may surprise you to learn that exactly none of them answer to the name Bud.

While this may strike some suds lovers as pretentious, the truth is, it's a matter of taste.

“Life's too short to drink shit beer,” proclaims La Sher. “There are just too many wonderful beers out there. I don't have anything in the cooler that I wouldn't drink myself.”

The same holds true for the La Cave's impressive wine list, which typically offers 500 wines by the bottle and some 70 by the glass. Again, if you're looking for a bottle of, say, Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, your search will be a fruitless one.

“We try not to carry wines you can buy at a truck stop,” adds La Sher.

As one of Cleveland's oldest wine bars, La Cave has done plenty to spread the gospel of the grape. La Sher and his staff have near encyclopedic knowledge of their inventory and are quick to make suggestions when called upon to do so. Answers to questions such as, “What wines do you normally drink?” and “Do you prefer sweet wines or dry wines?” are processed into suggestions and/or samples to try. While flights of wine typically aren't offered, small, two-ounce pours are available for tasting. Also, once a month La Cave stages wine tastings, which present oenophiles with the opportunity to sample a variety of wines in a fun yet informative setting.

So, after almost a decade in the business of getting us sloshed, tastefully, does La Cave's appeal show any signs of age?

To the contrary. Just recently, the massive beer coolers were pushed back about 12 feet to make room for additional seating. And the beers-on-tap selection will soon double in size.

So what's hot right now in the wonderful world of wine?

“Ice wines,” says La Sher. “We're selling a ton of it.”