How to Smart Bomb a Restaurant Wine List

I learned how to read a restaurant wine list by watching the movie, The Terminator. Remember how the director plants the camera behind the eyes of the cyborg when Arnold enters a room? Whizz, whirr, scan—he locks and loads. The target is toast.

Same way I smart bomb a wine list at a restaurant.

Gimme a minute or two with your average list—50-60 wines, say—and I will nail the best deal in the house. It’ll never be a California Cabernet, or an Aussie Chardonnay, or, in the main, anything with “Grand Cru” in the name. Nope, too many other eyes on those, and so, too many dollars.

My wine might say Txakolí (a wine from northern Spain), or identify as from southern Italy’s Basilicata, or a Moscophilero from Greece, or a Costières de Nîmes of southern France. I look for under-the-radar names. I walk the Route d’Obscure.

Or I’ll check the back label on a bottle or two. If it says the name of importers Kermit Lynch or Neal Rosenthal, Eric Solomon or Terry Theise, it’s mine. That’s letting someone else do your work for you.

A good restaurant wine list will have a Terminator-able wine somewhere on its list. Scan for little-known winemaking areas and grape names, from reputable producers or importers, maybe from an odd or off year. 

It’s difficult to smart bomb really long lists, for example the ones at big-name steak houses, unless you pinch, between two fingers, the entire Cabernet- and Red Blend-based sections and turn them as one page. The section on red Burgundies won’t cough up much, except maybe a Rully or Givry. Again, Grand Cru is French for “second mortgage.”

Most of the time, I take those super-thick wine lists bound like photo albums and put them under my plate. That way, they place what I came for—the food—three inches closer to my mouth.