August Wines opens in West Ashley

For most of her career, Carolyn McCalley worked behind the scenes. She majored in arts management at the College of Charleston, then spent years in production — theater, a book tour series at an 800-person venue where big-name authors came through to promote their books, and corporate events for a global ed tech company. Now, for the first time, the production is hers.

Carolyn, 30, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, came to Charleston for college, and moved back about two years ago after living in DC and New Orleans. She settled in West Ashley and went looking for a boutique wine shop. “I was really kind of coming up empty,” she says. While weighing a career pivot (private chef work and culinary school were on the shortlist), she started running numbers on a different idea: opening the wine shop she couldn’t find. “I don’t think I would have had the idea if I lived two doors down from Graft downtown,” she says.

Carolyn’s interest in wine didn’t come from family or fine dining. It came from proximity and curiosity. The Trader Joe’s wine buyer walked into a boutique shop near her work in DC that specialized in Latin American wines. “I was looking around and seeing all these labels and names I never heard of,” she says. “I started talking to people in the shop and learning more and more about growing regions and winemakers.” Ten years later (“maybe nine, for legal reasons,” she jokes), that interest turned into August Wines, a brick-and-mortar shop at 1662 Savannah Highway that officially opened this month.

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Getting from idea to open doors was a learning curve — retail rent, city permitting, the ABL licensing process, and how wine distribution actually works in South Carolina. “I was learning something new every day,” she says. Her husband was there to help with emotional support and manual labor. The name, by the way, is her word-association answer to “quintessential Charleston” — summer, without being too on the nose about it.

Carolyn holds a wine certification but is quick to say she’s not a sommelier and never worked a fine dining floor. Her credential is more direct: she has personally tasted about 95% of the wine in her shop. “You can trust that I’ve tried almost everything and can speak to its flavor profile,” she says. The shop carries about 150 wines, headed toward 200, all small-production and low-intervention — bottles you won’t find at the big-box retailers. Instead of 200 Cabernets, August Wines carries five, so the shelves can hold a variety of regions. Most bottles are under $40 and the most expensive is in the $50s. “I don’t want people in the community to feel like quality wine is out of reach,” she says.

August Wines recently launched Endless Summer, a $70 a month wine club membership that offers three curated bottles with tasting notes and pairings. Online ordering with in-store pickup is also available. Down the road, Carolyn wants a second location with a wine bar.

August Wines is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5. Closed Mondays.