Dreck Girl

In November we stated in the paper version of Unfair Park that Tony's Wine Warehouse & Restaurant was essentially a sucker farm where customers were consistently snookered into buying over-the-hill wines at over-the-top prices. Time will tell who sucks now. Tony's owner Michel Monzain unloaded the two-decades old warehouse and "gourmet" restaurant last month to Deep Ellum nightclubber Paul DiBiase (Club Indigo). "Of course we slashed the prices about 90 percent across the board because they were kind of high on a lot of wines," says DiBiase, who plans on installing a wine bar and revamping the restaurant. "We cleared out a lot of the old bad wines."

And how. DiBiase says he dumped much of the inventory (700 cases) at a buck a case, pawning it off as cooking wine. He trashed some and sold the barely drinkable chucks at two bucks a bottle. "We had over 40,000 cases in here," he says. How'd DiBiase wander into the Tony hole? He answered an ad Monzain was running for a sales person and decided he'd rather buy than swill. --Mark Stuertz