10 Wine Faux Pas I Personally Witnessed

Search the internet for wine faux pas. There are plenty of them. Many of them are made up, I'm afraid and some of them are so minor as to be ... well, so minor. But, I've seen a bunch of them and some are not minor; they are major. Let's explore.

1. Your wine might be better than mine. Going to a BYOB party, we brought a nice bottle of wine. You might even say it was a very nice bottle of wine. It was clear that this party was BYOB. It said so on the invitation. Most bottles had little markers on them so that a person could distinguish her bottle from yours. I uncorked our bottle and placed it in a back corner of the area that was being used as a bar. 

A couple walked in who were not wine drinkers. One grabbed a glass, about a 16 ounce tumbler and proceeded to grab our bottle and fill his glass to the top. And guzzle it. And remark that it was pretty tasty.

2. I don't like sweet wine, but I like my wine sweet. Apparently to this wine drinker, sweet wine isn't very good. She said so. It doesn't really taste sugary, it tastes fruity. But, she found a way to fix that. Her wine of choice is white zinfandel on the rocks with three packets of sweet and low, gently stirrred with a spoon in a glass. 

While I don't have anything kind to say about white zinfandel, this concoction is just wrong. In so many ways. 

You may like what you want, but watered down artificailly sweetened, bad wine, is over the top.

3. Insulting the sommelier. This goes bask many years. I didn't know much about wine. I did know, however, that the sommelier in the restaurant did. In this case, I found the sommelier to be particularly helpful. 

The ladies at the next table did not, though. We overheard their conversation as they looked at the wine list. They were complaining about the wines on the wine list that in retrospect was well done and quite expansive (while I don't recall if it had one or not, I think this restaurant might have had a Wine Spectator award). 

One of these ladies who was particularly loud called the sommelier over. The conversation went something like this.

S: How can I help you?
LOL (loud obnoxious lady): We need the real wine list.
S: This is our wine list, ma'am.
LOL: It can't be. The review said this restaurant has an excellent wine list. Whoever made this up is an idiot.
S: I did, ma'am. I'm sorry.
LOL: How can you call this a wine list? It has no Kendall-Jackson.

4. Mixing wines. Hosting a sitdown dinner party at our home for a large enough number of guests that people were seated at multiple tables, I was serving wine.At any point in time, a guest's choices were red or white. As I was checking on glasses and refilling them, one guest asked why I didn't offer her any.

I remarked that her glass was still nearly half full. She said that's okay, you can top it off. I explained that I was pouring a different wine than she had in her glass. She said, "What's the difference? It's still wine, isn't it?"

5. It's not a frat party. This was one I saw at a restaurant about 10 years ago traveling on business. I was in a midwestern city eating alone. There was a group of quite full of themselves likely salesguys at the next table. They ordered a magnum (a double bottle or 1500 ml as compared to the standard 750 ml bottle) of wine.

The server uncorked it, went through the normal formalities and served a normal sized pour to each guest. With the server still there, one of the guys blasted the server for the small pours (roughly 40% full in decent wine glasses). The server was dumbfounded, but the salesguy showed him. 

He picked up the bottle by the neck, brought it toward him, turned it somewhat neck down and inserted the end of the bottle into his mouth at which point he proceeded to down the remaining half bottle ... straight from the bottle.

6. With a mixer. Apparently, this is common in both the UK and Greece. While it's done broadly in the UK, in Greece, it's done mostly with Retsina, wine that is actually made from the Retsina grape, an ancient one, and sealed with resin. What drinkers do is they mix it with cola. Yes, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, or any other cola they can get their hands on and in any proportion that seems handy at the moment.

I had never heard of this, shall we say, phenomenon. Out at a sports bar, I heard a guy order a Merlot and a Coke ... and an extra glass. Interesting, I thought. It was more interesting when the drinks came. 

He poured some wine into the extra glass, added some coke to nearly the top, put his hand over the top and shook it up.

7. Drunk sabering. It's become quite the rage to "saber" your champagne bottle to open it. It's what it sounds like. After removing the muselet, the cage over the cork on the champagne bottle, you take a dullish sword and with a carefully placed sword and swing it at the bottom of the cork ejecting it from the bottle.

Imagine being the sommelier at a restaurant hosting a New Year's Eve party. Imagine that you have a 6-liter bottle, a Methusaleh in champagne bottle terms and a sword to saber it with. Imagine that you are far too drunk to be doing this.

But, competent (or not) and confident, you endeavor to saber this bottle ... and you miss your mark ... by a lot ... and you break the bottle ... in such a way as that 6 liters of champagne go all over many of the guests and the floor. Yes, it happened and yes, I was there.

8. Sending back the bottle a bit late. This was one I saw, but I didn't know exactly what was going on. The server with whom I was casually friendly told me what happened.

The couple at the next table ordered a fairly expensive bottle of wine. It was opened, the gentleman tasted the wine and approved of it. The server poured each a glass. As the glasses became almost empty, the server asked if they would like him to fill their glasses and they nodded affirmatively. 

About 30 minutes later, with the bottle now roughly three-quarters empty, the gentleman called over the server. He wanted to send back the bottle and get a refund for it because it wasn't very good.

9. Avoiding corkage. For those who don't know, corakage is the fee that you pay to a restaurant that allows the practice if you bring your own bottle of wine. Most restaurants will request, but not require, that if you are doing this, you bring a bottle that is not on their wine list. The fee you are charged is intended to be for the wine service and to somewhat compensate them for not be able to sell you any wine.

As an aside, if you offer your server a taste of the wine, they will often waive the corkage fee (there is no requirement, but this is at least a bit customary).

In any event, a couple brought in an already opened bottle of wine to a restaurant. From the looks of it, it was about 80% full. The corkage fee at this restaurant was $20.

When their check came, they objected to being charged the full $20 corkage fee. After all, since the bottle was only "half full" in their words, they should only be charged $10.

10. Insulting the winemaker. One of the potentially great experiences in enjoying wine can be to go to a well-done winemaker dinner. A winery will showcase its wines and a chef will develop dishes to pair with those wines. What can make these ezperiences especially fun is that the person who actually made the wine shares with you what they have crafted and how they did it.

Remember, this is their life; this is their passion. Each is doing his or her absolute best to craft wines that express their personality. You may love the wines or you may hate the wines, but either way, you are experiencing the art of an artist.

The lady sitting across from us described herself as a wine teacher. The first wine was a rose. After describing his wine and his process, the winemaker walked around the table talking to the guests. This lady had left her glass untouched. In her words as she put it to the winemaker, "Rose isn't real wine."

But, it got better ... or worse.

The next wine was a Sauvignon Blanc. The lady called over the server and asked for a lemon wedge. When it was brought to her, and this was before she had tasted the Sauvignon Blanc, she took the lemon wedge and rubbed it all around the rim of the wine glass the lemon juice liberally spilling into the wine. (To be fair, just a very tiny hint of lemon will soften the acidity in an acidic wine like Sauvignon Blanc.) 

Loud enough for the winemaker to hear, this wine instructor exclaimed that Sauvignon Blanc is bad, cheap wine and this is the way to improve it.