Last week, a friend of mine complained that he couldn’t find a single bottle of elderberry liqueur anywhere. Why he was so hell bent on elderberry liqueur, I have no idea, but he had been to two liquor stores and left both empty-handed. So I put my judgments aside and told him about the PLCB’s handy Product Search page.

You punch in your search criteria (just the product name is enough), enter your city on the next screen, and, voilà, you get a list of the stores in your area along with the number of bottles in each. Or, if you’re not exactly sure what you want and you want to do some research ahead of a store visit, you can, for example, search for all available Argentinean reds between $20 and $30 and then plug the results into Wine Spectator to get ratings.

If inventory appears to be very low, it’s best to call the store ahead to make sure the bottle you’re looking for is actually on the shelves. Now if we can just get the LCB to update those blue laws.