Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [103]
Where should I shop? That depends on what you’re buying. If you know what you want, then price is your main consideration, and you’ll get your best deals at venues that concentrate on volume sales—discount stores, price clubs, and so on. If you want buying advice, or are buying rare wines, you’re better off in a wine shop or merchant specializing in fine wines. These stores have trained buyers who taste and know their inventory well; they can help you with your decision. The better stores also have temperature-controlled storage for their rare wines, which is critical to ensure you get a product in good condition. There are also web-based fine and rare wine specialists, but that is a fairly new market. I suggest you purchase fine and rare wines only through sources with a good track record of customer service. In that way, if you have problems with a shipment, you will have some recourse.
Can I take that bottle on the wine list home with me? In most states, restaurants’ wine licenses allow for sale and consumption “on-premise” only, meaning they cannot sell you a bottle to take home. There are some exceptions, though, such as California.
Is that a deal or a disaster? Floor stacks, “end caps,” private labels, and bin ends can be a boon for the buyer, or a bust, depending on where you are shopping. Here is how to tell the difference:
Burgundy Buyers, Beware
With the exception of volume categories such as Beaujolais, Mâcon, and Pouilly-Fuissé, buyers of French white and red Burgundy should shop only at fine wine merchants, preferably those that specialize in Burgundy, for two reasons. First, storage: Burgundy is simply too fragile to endure the storage conditions in most stores. Even many fine wine stores do not have temperature-controlled storage for their wines. Before you buy, ask if they do. Second, selection is a major factor, because quality varies a lot from one winery to the next, and from one vintage to the next. Specialist stores have the needed buying expertise to ensure the quality of their offerings.
Restaurant Wine Buying
For me, it just isn’t a restaurant experience worth having if there isn’t an interesting wine list involved. (The exceptions are coastal or south of the border-esque experiences—I’ll happily do bivalves and beer or margaritas and Mexican.) But I often get the impression that people think bad restaurant wine experiences happen to them alone, maybe when they’re eating in a (shoulda-known-better) snobby French restaurant and feeling self-conscious. Well, bad wine-buying experiences can happen to anyone, including me.
When I was leaving Windows on the World’s 50,000-bottle cellar for a giant hotel company with 600,000 cases per year of wine bought and sold, my wine colleagues gathered for a little celebration. I had saved up and set aside a little wine budget of $1,500 to commemorate the occasion. I say little budget because in this restaurant you could, if you wanted to, spend that on just one bottle. Since that wouldn’t go very far among six of us, I planned to spend a few hundred dollars per bottle on average, and enjoy the most luxurious night of my entire wine life.
It was not to be. I kid you not: The wine waiter broke absolutely every rule of decent wine service. Yes, I am a Master Sommelier, but that hardly makes me a tough customer. Far from it; I know firsthand the blood, sweat, and tears behind every nightly performance. But there are certain service basics that everyone has the right to expect when paying restaurant prices for wine. We’ll discuss more specifics of professional service in Chapter 10, but here are the basics you have the right to expect, along with strategies to help you get the best service possible.
What Is Good Restaurant Wine Service?
BASIC WINE SERVICE RULE #1: