Here's how to order wine at a restaurant like a pro.
It was the Thursday before Christmas and I was at Oceana in New York City pretending to be a sommelier. Around me the floor was bustling: family dinners, end-of-year get-togethers, dates; servers and captains racing around; the somm team uncorking bottle after bottle; a manager wheeling a 10-pound king crab, like a prehistoric hubcap with legs, through the dining room on a cart. I was at table 42, a deuce.
But what the heck, a lot of life is a debate between comfort and excitement. Let’s see, for today’s activity, afternoon in the spa or shark-cage diving? Wine lists, conveniently, offer the possibility of novelty and excitement without actual danger. You’re not apt to get your arm chewed off if you go wild and order a Grenache from the mountains near Madrid, for instance.
The answer, as a guest, is simply not to worry about the words. Explain what you like in your own language. Even a statement that pretty much makes no sense—like “a sweet, dry red wine that isn’t too bitter but still has a bold flavor,” as one guest told Chris McFall, a member of the sommelier team at Mastro’s—is still a doorway to a conversation. In that particular case, McFall replied, “Great. So tell me the last wine you had that’s like that. 19 Crimes? All right then.
Essentially, there are two ways to react to a lack of comfort choices: freak out or have fun. My advice is the latter. Put yourself in the hands of the staff, and odds are you’ll end up like a woman I spoke to on my last night at Allora. She was waiting by the front door for her coat, and I asked her what she’d been drinking with dinner. “It was some northern Greek wine you have,” she said. “It was red—”“Yes!” she exclaimed.
As a restaurant guest, why not take advantage of that? But note that sommeliers aren’t mind readers—to suggest a wine to go with your food, they have to know what food you’re going to order. But then again, you could always order a glass of Champagne—you deserve one, right?—while you figure that part out.
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