How to Ruin Your Wine Service

Imagine this. You go to restaurant that you really like. You pick out a wine that will go particularly well with the food and you order it. And, what do you know? The message that comes back is that they haven't had that wine for several months. Not a few days, but several months. And, their wine list is disposable paper. So, it's not as if they have to reprint a fancy list on fancy paper and bind it or laminate it; it's just on plain paper.

After that, you find another bottle that you think you'll like with the food and the server tells you that that was an interesting switch. Interesting in a you must be freaking idiot way. His point was that it was not a particularly similar wine. And, while in a sense he was right, in a sense he was very wrong as well.

You see, while the new wine was of a different grape and from a very different part of the same country, the two wines did share some characteristics that were very important to me with this dinner. Both were red. Both had a bit of spice to them and both had lots of herbal notes, particularly oregano. So, even though they had the differences that I noted, in some important ways, they were the same.

Could our server have handled things differently? Of course, he could, and here are a few things he could have done. Offer us a slightly more expensive wine than the one we ordered, but at the same price, although I likely would have turned him down on that because the only similar wines that were more expensive were much more expensive. Ask if we'd like help selecting another wine. If we answered that we would some appropriate questions might include what made us choose the first wine, what we were thinking about eating, what we like in wine, and if there was a price range we were trying to stay in. But, no, he chose to insult my judgment. 

That's not a good way to make John happy.

All's well that ends well. Perhaps that would make a good title for my next play unless someone else stole my idea first. The food was excellent. The wine we chose paired very well and was quite tasty. We had a nice quiet seat, got out before the restaurant got too crowded and overall had quite a good evening.

It could have been a little bit better.

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