Avoiding Restaurant Wine Disappointments

Have you ever been to a restaurant and ordered wine and then been really disappointed with what you got? If you haven't, either you don't drink wine in restaurants or you don't have much of a sense of what you are drinking. Frankly, you can't avoid it all the time, but you can some of the time.

Let's start with how you order. Are you sitting at a restaurant bar or at a table? At the bar, if you are getting a glass of wine, it's not unusual that you can ask for a small taste before getting a glass. If you do that and then have a bad experience, that's probably your fault. But, at a table, it's different. 

Probably, at a table, you and one or several other people have ordered a glass of wine or some other drink and then eventually, the glass comes and the server serves everyone and walks away and then you taste in the middle of a conversation and pfftt%%##!!. Yuk. It just doesn't taste very good -- not a poorly made wine problem, but more of a there shouldn't be anything wrong with this wine but it still tastes horrible problem. What's going on?

Typically, the glasses that this happens with fall into a few categories. Either they are the cheapest wine on the list (come on, if you can tell the difference and you are ordering that wine, you are asking for trouble), an unusual wine that nobody will order (think about a wine list filled with the "normal" grapes and then you go and order the white blend from Bolivia), or, and this might come as a surprise, you order a glass of the wine that is seemingly too high end and therefore too pricey to be on this by the glass list. Those last two problems have something in common.

What is the common bond? Neither gets ordered very often. By the glass drinkers tend to order what they know and they tend to not spend as much on a glass as their neighbor might spend on a bottle. So, the Hola La Paz white blend and the Chateau Grand Cru (both fictional, I hope) just don't move very quickly. Assuming the bottles have been uncorked and not used a Coravin or similar devcie to extract the wine through the cork, there could be a problem. 

Suppose that at $55 per glass, the restaurant can only sell, on average, one glass of Chateau Granf Cru per night. Further suppose that you are getting the final pour from the bottle. Well, today si Friday. It sounde like the bottle might have been opened on Monday. That's not good. Lots of bad things have happened to this bottle over the previous 4 days. Your $55 glass of wine is undrinkable. Yet, many restaurants will not refund you for a glass of wine that you don't like.

How do you avoid this? If you are ordering a "standard" wine in the middle of the price points, you likely don't have to worry about this. But, if you're ordering one of those others, I think it's fair to ask a few questions. Does the restaurant "date" its bottles? That is, do they mark the bottle with the day or date it was opened? If not, and if they can't tell you when the bottle was opened, don't take the wine. And, certainly, if the bottle was opened more than [either one day prior or two depending on how discriminating you are] days prior, take a pass.

In the case of any of these wines, the restaurant might own them because the distributor forced the restaurant to take a few of them in order to get allocations of the couple of labels they really wanted. The restaurant couldn't move these unusual bottls, so they made them available by the glass. They can still sell them, but don't let them sell them to you.