What it’s actually like
Scottsdale’s most beloved mayor sold liquor through a drive-thru window, and the city never held it against him. Herb Drinkwater and his wife Jackie bought a package store on the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, business records date it to January 1, 1964, and turned it into Drinkwater’s Liquor & Cheese, a store with a cheese counter, a wine wall and the window that made it famous, where a bottle and a wedge could be handed into a car without anyone getting out. From 1980 to 1996 the man handing them over was the mayor. He kept the store the whole time, and the sight of the city’s chief executive behind the counter on a Saturday was a large part of why Scottsdale elected him over and over.
The corner was a good choice. In 1964 Scottsdale Road and Shea was near the northern edge of the city, and the 1970s and 1980s filled the surrounding desert with McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale Ranch and the subdivisions of the Shea Corridor, all of which drove past Drinkwater’s on the way home. A liquor store at the busiest intersection in the northern half of the city, run by a man everyone liked, did very well. Son Mark Drinkwater worked there before he became a developer and a partner in the Jetz and Stixx nightclubs at Camelback Mall in the early 1990s.
Herb died in 1997, a year after leaving office. The family business, later called Drinkwater’s Wine & Cheese, was sold and rebranded around 2009 under Sportsman’s Fine Wine & Spirits, and by most accounts that is when the Drinkwater era ended. A store carrying the Drinkwater’s name has since been listed further north on Scottsdale Road, so the name has not entirely left the road; the family has.
What it sold
Liquor, wine and beer in the full package-store range, and the cheese counter that gave the store its name and its distinction, a deli case of imported and domestic cheeses in a city that in the 1960s did not have many. The drive-thru window sold all of it. Later, as the Wine & Cheese name suggests, the wine side grew into a serious selection for the corridor’s affluent households.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, one of the busiest intersections in the city and the commercial heart of the Shea Corridor. The corner is still retail; nothing on it marks the Drinkwater years, and a store using the Drinkwater’s name has been listed at 10802 North Scottsdale Road, further north, under later ownership. For the name itself, go downtown: Drinkwater Boulevard wraps the Civic Center, where the mayor’s statue stands on the mall, and the free Civic Center garage is off it.
The successors worth a visit
For a bottle and a wedge in the same part of town, the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch on Via Linda is the lakeside shopping village of the ranch the store watched being built, and AJ’s Fine Foods at Hilton Village, the Valley’s upscale grocer, is the modern home of the wine-and-cheese counter the Drinkwaters pioneered. For dinner at the intersection itself, Jing at Scottsdale Road and Shea is the corner’s current landmark. A short way south, Handlebar J off Scottsdale Road has been the corridor’s rib house and two-stepping dance hall since 1975, which means it fed the Shea corner through the whole of the mayor’s time behind the counter. For Mark Drinkwater’s side of the story, the Camelback Mall page covers the nightclubs; for the mayor’s, the 1980s and 1990s histories cover the sixteen years he ran the city from behind a liquor-store counter.
How it got here
Herb Drinkwater was born in 1936, and by the time he and Jackie bought the package store at Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, dated in business records to January 1, 1964, Scottsdale was a young city with a charter, a mall at Camelback Road and a northern edge that lay, by most accounts, not far beyond Shea. The store was a bet on the direction of growth, and the 1960s and 1970s paid it off; McCormick Ranch was laid out to the east in the early 1970s, and the corner became the gateway to the northern half of the city.
Drinkwater’s Liquor & Cheese grew into an institution on two things: the drive-thru window, which was a convenience Arizona allowed and Scottsdale drivers loved, and the owner, who was the kind of man people drove out of their way to buy from. The cheese counter was the store’s civilizing touch, a deli case in a liquor store, and the Wine & Cheese name it later adopted tells you where the business went as the corridor’s households got richer.
In 1980 the city elected Herb mayor, and it kept electing him for sixteen years. His 1980s were the decade Scottsdale annexed its way north and grew into the resort metropolis it is now; his 1990s saw the fight over the preserve begin. Through all of it he ran the store. The mayor at the liquor-store counter, a bottle in one hand and a constituent’s problem in the other, is the Scottsdale of that era in a single frame, and it is why Drinkwater Boulevard, the road around the Civic Center, carries his name. He left office in 1996 and died in 1997.
Mark Drinkwater, who had worked the store as a young man, went into development and in 1992 partnered with Les Corieri to open Jetz at Camelback Mall, then Stixx, two of the hottest clubs in Arizona in the years his father was still mayor. The family store outlived Herb by about a dozen years. Around 2009, by then Drinkwater’s Wine & Cheese, it was sold and rebranded under Sportsman’s Fine Wine & Spirits, and the Drinkwater family era ended. A store using the name has since been listed further up Scottsdale Road, and the name on the boulevard downtown is permanent, which is the better memorial: a liquor store’s name on the road to city hall, put there by a city that saw nothing odd in it.