HOW TO READ A RESTAURANT WINE LIST

Ugh. Here comes the wine steward. They used to be an imperious, ambulant tuxedo with a silver ashtray around their neck. These days, they’re just imperious. (By and large, much has improved in the ways of wine and customer hospitality. That is to say, there’s less and less of the imperial.)

The steward (or “somm,” to use the contemporary term) is soon to ask “Have we chosen a wine?”—“we”!—and you haven’t glanced past Page One. And you don’t want to. It’s just a long list of names and places as strange as a teenager’s music.

So, it’s going to be another any-old Chardonnay or Merlot night out, huh?

It needn’t be.

Even if a restaurant wine list is long, it’s certain to be organized in some way or other. Even the simplest wine list separates the red wines from the white (and sometimes even further, into groups such as sweet wines and sparkling wines).

But restaurants also categorize lists either by region, grape variety or (you will see this more and more) by the style or “weight” of the wine. Any of these can be helpful when looking for the best match for your meal.

By region
This list is purely geographic and arranges wines A-Z by country—from Argentina to Zealand, New. If the list is lengthy, countries often are broken down further by winemaking districts within them (for instance, U.S.A. —> California; then perhaps California —> Napa, Sonoma, and so on).

Choosing a wine from such a list is easy if you know the kinds of wine produced in, say, France’s northern Rhône Valley, as distinct from France’s Loire Valley. Or, to give another example, if you prefer Chardonnay from Mâcon, Burgundy, to Chardonnay from South Australia.

But such a list doesn’t help distinguish among individual wines. For example, not all Napa Cabernets or Oregon Pinot Noirs are the same.

By grape variety
This list separates wines by the main grape that makes them. For example, under “Sauvignon Blanc” such a list might include a Sancerre, a dry Graves, a Washington State Fumé Blanc and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

The benefit of this kind of list is that it gathers wine from many different regions and puts them under one rubric—taste.

What a list like this can’t tell you, however, are the sometimes not-so-subtle differences among, for example, Syrahs made in different parts of the world.

By style (or “weight”)
An increasing number of wine lists categorize their wines according to the “weight” or style of the wine. This idea underpins everyday wine and food pairings—that is, the principle that delicate flavors and textures go best with delicate wines, just as weighty, forceful foods accompany stronger wines.

To illustrate an example, this kind of wine list would have a category such as “light-bodied, dry white wines” that lists, for example —> a French Chablis, a German Riesling, and a Spanish Albariño.

Or under “medium-bodied, dry white wines,” for instance —> a Sonoma Chardonnay, a Tuscan Vernaccia, and an Alsatian Pinot Blanc. And so on.

The benefit of this kind of list is obvious: it helps you match, readily and easily, the food preparation that you are ordering with its best wine partner.

Restaurant wine prices
Restaurants use several formulae to price their wines. Many restaurants also price good-value wines one way and more costly wines another.

But a general rule is that a restaurant marks up its wines 2–2 1/2 times its cost. For example, if a restaurant pays $15 wholesale for a bottle of Pinot Grigio, it prices that wine on its wine list somewhere between $30-$38 a bottle. (Wines-by-the-glass are priced at roughly four times cost, figuring 5-6 glasses a bottle. A glass of that Pinot Grigio, then, would cost you $10-$12.)

When many people compare the price of a wine at a restaurant and the very same wine at a retail store, they often get miffed. (For example, that Pinot Grigio would cost about $18 at a large wine store.) “It’s not as if the restaurant is doing anything to the bottle,” people feel, “the same way that they fix the food in the kitchen. They just store their wine, open it, and pour it.”

But restaurants buy wines in a different manner than wine stores do (often only one case at a time, something that wine stores rarely, if ever, do) and restaurants have different reasons for their prices than wine stores do.

Restaurant wine prices, taken as a whole, support a varied (and sometimes deep) inventory and help pay for glass usage and breakage. And, like the way it marks up everything from chicken breasts to whipping cream, the restaurant marks up its wines in order to meet its overall costs.

As a form of relief, keep in mind that it’s commonly true that you will find wines available at restaurants that are no longer for sale in stores.

Would you like to smell the cork?
The traditional restaurant wine-opening ritual needn’t put you out. Especially the part about the cork.

If, after opening the bottle that you ordered, the wine steward or your server lays the cork to the side of your table setting, just leave it there. Inspecting the cork was important a century ago, when wine bottles had been cellared for 20-30 years. But it isn’t important now.

What’s key is to get the wine poured for your inspection or around the table as soon as possible. Simply ask to have either of these done.

If you’re not into the ceremony of swirling, sniffing, and sipping a sample of your wine, ask the steward to pour the wine around the table. If the wine is bad or “off” (or “corked” *), you’ll find out anyway and the restaurant will replace the bottle.

Red wines—temperature and “breathing”
Normal room temperature is generally too warm for red wines. At 70-72°F, a red wine tastes flat and dull. The ideal serving temperature for most reds is 65° (or, for certain reds such as Beaujolais, even less).

Some restaurants—certainly not all—store red wines at cellar temperature (50°-55°). If your red wine arrives too warm, don’t be shy to request that it be plunged into a mix of ice and water for 2-3 minutes in order to bring it down to around 65°. Because you’re the one paying for it, you really ought to have it at its best.

Aerating or "breathing" red wine often softens or mellows it. At the very least, it refreshes it (it’s been clammed up in that bottle for 2-5 years or more, after all). If you "breathe" your red wine, by all means don't merely have the server leave the opened bottle on butt end.

Leaving a red wine to aerate with the little aperture of the bottle's neck is like refreshing a summerhouse after a long winter by opening just the attic window.

Really get air to it by pouring the red wine into a decanter or around the table into the bowls of the glassware.

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* “Corked” describes a wine that has been made defective by a faulty (though neither crumbly nor leaky) cork. Wines so affected have an unmistakable smell like wet, musty old newspapers or cardboard, or like a dank basement.