Wine by The Glass
Written By: Brian Freedman on Fri, Aug 10th 2007
There’s a bit of a wine revolution going on these days, and nowhere is this more apparent than with the wines restaurants are serving by the glass. Of course, this is not a revolution without its share of problems: As I noted earlier this week in the newsletter, there are still far too many restaurants out there that refuse to list the vintages of their wines by the glass on the list, sending the grossly distorted message that either (a) vintage doesn’t matter or (b) guests wouldn’t know the difference anyway.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, and the upside of this revolution far outweighs any negatives.
Most notable is the fact that you can actually drink pretty well these days without having to commit to a full bottle. And for those of us who enjoy playing around with food and wine pairings, this is huge: Unless you have an unlimited budget or are going out on someone else’s dime, how are you supposed to find a single bottle that will compliment, for example, the salad, a plate of chilled shellfish from the raw bar, and a strip steak?
Now, however, these ever-expanding lists of wines by the glass are making a non-issue of this problem: A decent selection of a dozen reds and whites, with perhaps a few sparklers and stickies thrown in there for good measure, can make a meal an infinitely more interesting experience than it otherwise would have been.
The key to the success of these lists, of course, is variety, both in terms of the wines represented and the types of producers on the lists. A shiraz, a cabernet sauvignon, and a merlot are perfectly fine (if somewhat boring) additions to a by-the-glass list, but not if they’re produced by the kind of immense wine conglomerates whose focus is trained more on the bottom line than it is on producing anything even remotely interesting.
Restaurants with vision, however, are starting to see the light. So instead of listing, say, a Yellow Tail shiraz, they’ll include the Razor’s Edge shiraz—both wines are from Australia and both are in the under-$15 range. Yet the latter is infinitely more interesting and food-friendly than the former.
And there’s a real benefit for the restaurant, too: The more they can get their customers to try new wines—and the best way to do that is to train the staff in describing the wines and to keep prices reasonably low—the more likely they are to have repeat visitors who will branch out and taste something new the next time, whether by the glass or by the bottle.
One of the most commonly heard complaints about ordering wines in a restaurant is that they are marked up so much (a bottle often costs anywhere from two to four or five times as much as it should). But with a well-chosen list of wines by the glass, guests are afforded the opportunity to taste wines that they may otherwise never have given a chance. And the restaurants can make money on a group of people who might not have spent anything on wine before if their only option had been a bottle. In the end, everyone wins.
