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[LosingNow]

 Sounding Off on Restaurant Wine Service
Our Readers Tell Us Their Pet Peeves;
A Big C for 'Cheap'
March 9, 2007; Page W6

It happened over a year ago, but Bradley Lundy, an analyst with an investment-management company, is still angry about it. At a fancy Los Angeles restaurant, he ordered a $50 bottle of wine. All around him, diners were drinking from lovely Riedel glasses, but "I got one of those tiny, old-school Italian-restaurant wine glasses." When he insisted on better glasses, the waiter refused. "It was crystal clear I hadn't ordered an expensive enough bottle," Mr. Lundy told us. He regrets not having walked out, but he has never returned, which even Mr. Lundy says is a real shame because "the food is fabulous."

Memo to restaurateurs: Small, easy-to-correct problems with your wine service are making a good number of diners very unhappy. Some are letting you know about it, but most, like Mr. Lundy, will simply never return. A few weeks ago, we wrote a column listing 10 minor issues that make the wine experience irksome at some restaurants. The response was extraordinary.

Real Clunkers

Mr. Lundy's experience, for instance, is hardly unique. It has happened to us, too. We were at a restaurant once where the waiter actually took away the nice glasses from our table and replaced them with real clunkers. Sure, there are good reasons why different wines might be served in different glasses, depending on issues like whether the wine is red or white, young or old, sweet or dry, sparkling or still. And we can even imagine some cases where a diner orders a very, very special wine so the owner breaks out the glasses he usually only uses on his own anniversary.

But, in general, linking the quality of the glass to the price of the wine is annoying and insulting. Restaurants argue that, hey, you have to consider the cost of glasses, breakage, and so on. But, in fact, the markup on lower-priced wines is generally a higher percentage than on more expensive wines. There's plenty of room built into that lower price for good glasses. Our guess is that diners who order less-expensive bottles get the bad glasses to make a statement to them -- and to other diners. Kind of like a big, scarlet C on their chests -- for "Cheap."

"I have recoiled in some restaurants where they overprice the wine and then deliver the equivalent of Bugs Bunny juice glasses to drink it in," wrote Donald Alford Weadon Jr. of Washington, D.C. "With the advent of better-quality glass and durable crystal, there is no excuse to set garbage glassware." We couldn't agree more.

Interestingly, we received more mail from women in response to that column than almost any column we've written. We're not sure why. Maybe women notice these slights more than men. Or perhaps women are more often slighted, as Dottie sometimes is when she eats out alone or in the company of other women. In any event, quite a few letter writers simply wrote to give us a hear! hear! on points we made. For instance:
• Overfilling glasses when you've ordered a bottle. Edmond R. Pelta from Brunswick, Maine, wrote that he dislikes "servers who 'park' as much wine as they can get into a glass." He added, "Our daughter, who is an otherwise civilized young lady, learned this practice when she was working as a cocktail waitress at an upscale restaurant in San Jose, Calif., when she was a college student. Unfortunately, she hasn't unlearned the practice and when she is at our house, she will pour everyone at the table a rather full glass if I can't stop her first."
 
• On the other hand, a number of people, like us, would really rather just do it ourselves. "I would prefer 'don't pour,' " wrote Gerald F. McIlvain of Chicago. "I find I drink much too quickly when the wait-staff pours from my bottle."
 
• Decanting without permission. "I was particularly interested to hear that restaurants in your neck of the woods decant without permission," wrote Irene Nattel. "Here in Montreal, decanters are always at hand, but I have never had a wine decanted without first being offered a taste, and then being asked whether we wanted the wine decanted. It hadn't occurred to me that it would be done any other way."
 
• Beyond that, several readers mentioned another point about decanting, as voiced by Veronica DeGuenther of Tampa, Fla. "I've always wondered when they take the bottle to open it or decant it away from the table, how do you know it is the same wine you purchased?" Or, as Lyle Hubbard of Portland, Ore., put it: "When you decant, do the whole process at the table. It's great drama and romances the experience -- and ensures that we received the wine we ordered (ouch!)."
 
• Serving reds too warm and whites too cold. "More often than not, I must ask our waiter to plunge a just-ordered bottle of red into a bucket of ice. The reaction? The server looks at me like I have three heads," wrote Jeff Linder of Great Neck, N.Y. On the other hand: "Add one more: White wine served too cold, and then they want to put the bottle in a bucket of ice," wrote Mike Powers of Morristown, N.J.
 
• Taking away glasses before they're truly empty. "Can't count the number of times that a waiter has tried to abscond with the last great sip from my table," wrote James Milbery of Chicago.
 
• Serving mystery wine by the glass. "I often want to see the glass of wine I've ordered being poured. It seems very logical and courteous to do so," wrote John Murphy of Mansfield, Mass.
 
• Abusing wine. "The one that continues to amaze me are people who purport to know something about wine who store it in a dedicated, built-in rack -- in the kitchen, near the oven, over the stove..." wrote Mary Florin-McBride of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
 

In addition, many readers brought up other issues they find annoying:
• Don't leave wine in the "empty" bottle and take it away "to join the remnants of other bottles as the basis for the kitchen's next reduction," wrote Mike Williams of Chester Springs, Pa. "At $100 a bottle, this is grand larceny."
 
• "Don't twirl, spin or shake that bottle when you serve any wine, especially older wines," wrote Steven Pinsky of San Francisco.
 
• Ungenerous, or nonstandard, pours of wines by the glass. "I sure would like some standards when it comes to a 'glass of wine' rather than depending on the eye and guess of the server as to what constitutes a glass of wine," wrote Harold Hawkes of Melrose, Mass.
 
• Dirty glasses. Several people, such as Frank Webb of Wilmington, Del., mentioned glasses or decanters that smell of detergent and ruin the taste of the wine. Carin Fike of Cincinnati wrote: "Please clean wine glasses thoroughly so that I do not have to enjoy my glass of wine with a previous diner's lipstick on the rim." And Lou Martins of New York City added: "Seems simple enough, but I am always 'spotting' something (most of the time I don't want to know what), even at better places."
 

Talk about easy-to-fix problems! And that's really the point here. There are so many simple, little things restaurants could do to enhance the wine experience. And so many restaurants these days really do get everything right. Let's hope more do with each passing day.

[sgusa]

To this I add my pet peeve - Not having enough range even in a nice enough place. I cant be expected to order 100$ bottles all the time. I would like a few good choices ( and I dont mean generic merlots) in the $20-$50 range. I might be ordering for people new to wine and they really dont know enough to enjoy a $100 bottle anymore than a $20 bottle, and so I would like them to get a good $20 wine - not stuff that tastes like bad cough syrup!