Linda Collier, Collier's of Centreville: The Cellar Mistress

The owner of Collier’s of Centreville does not lack for confidence. Linda Collier, who grew up in tiny West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, has Yankee ingenuity running in her veins. “It has never entered my head to think that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to,” says Collier, whose voice still carries a Boston-area cadence. “I was raised to believe that if you want anything bad enough, you can do it.”

And in 1981, Collier wanted to open a wine shop. Today, that ambition scarcely raises an eyebrow. But in the 1980s, consumers in the Delmarva area knew little about wine, and few liquor store owners were women unless they worked in a family business. Collier was a sole proprietor.

“Linda Collier was ahead of her time,” says customer Candace Roseo, who is also a Wilmington restaurateur. Nearly 40 years later, the shop’s selection remains distinctive, she says. Customer Joanne Graves agrees. “Years ago, I was able to find a super special Barolo for my dad's birthday.”

As a child, however, Collier was more familiar with milk than merlot; her father owned a company that delivered milk to customers’ homes. Collier and her husband, Lou, developed an appreciation for fine wine while living in West Virginia, of all places. Credit a boutique wine store in nearby Marietta, Ohio. “We started playing with wine, and having parties and matching food and wine,” she recalls.

When her husband, a DuPont Co. employee, was transferred to Holland and then Geneva, Switzerland, their passion for wine took off. Six years later, when they moved to Delaware, they brought 600 bottles of European wine with them to cellar.

Given that wine was not ready, she visited a local store to find a selection to serve with veal in an herb-cream sauce. She told the clerk what she was making and requested a recommendation. He replied, “Lady, the whites are over there, and the reds are there—take your pick.”

The selection, she recalls, was terrible. So, she decided to take matters into her own hands. Within the week, she had a storefront in Wilmington’s Little Italy section. “I’m a 24-hour-from-start-to-finish kind of person,” she says. “That’s never changed.”

Since Delaware law forbade in-shop wine tastings, she called then- Governor Mike Castle and told him she would write a bill. He agreed to sign it if she got it through the Legislature. She wrote the bill and spoke on the House and Senate floors. It passed in two weeks.

Collier went on to write so many bills that she was asked to join a committee with legislators and a representative of the liquor commission to rewrite rules for retailers. “When I was getting started in the wine business in Delaware, Linda was my SHEro,” says Peggy Raley- Ward, who started Nassau Valley Vineyards in Lewes in the 1980s. To sell directly to consumers, Raley-Ward also had to storm Legislative Hall.