CHAPTER THIRTEEN
So, There You Are
in a Restaurant
Postcard From Paris: We Drank! We Ate!
By FRANK J. PRIAL
My friend Daniel Johnnes was on the line. A New York importer and sometime sommelier, he was lunching with some other wine enthusiasts at La Tour d’Argent, the Michelin two-star restaurant. Someone had not shown up. Would my wife and I be interested in filling in? There would be some great wines. I hesitated. I had just managed to get a table for the following night at Taillevent, three stars. Five stars in two days? Yes, indeed.
I grabbed a tie—needlessly. Standards had relaxed at the Tour since my last visit seven years ago. We hailed a taxi. The Tour d’Argent is a 15-minute walk from our apartment, but I did not want to hold things up. Or miss any of the wines. Mr. Johnnes and his party had come directly from the airport.
Here are some of the wines we drank from the Tour d’Argent cellar. Among the whites: Meursault-Perriers, 1990 and 1989, from Coche-Dury, and Bâtard-Montrachet, 1983 and 1982, from the Domaine Leflaive. Among the reds were: Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses, 1990 and 1985, from the Domaine Georges Roumier, and Échezeaux 1980, in magnums, from Henri Jayer. The only non-Burgundian wines were Château Rayas, 1990 and 1989, from Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
This was not some wimpy tasting, with sips, sniffs, frowns and scribbling of notes. The wines were for drinking, and there was a full meal to set them off: quenelles de brochet, baked St. Pierre and of course the famous Tour d’Argent duck with its companion postcard to send home to inform the folks you were served duck No. 1,102,506, or parts thereof.
The travelers then hastened to the Gare de Lyon for their train to Dijon and two days of Burgundian excess. I ambled over to Notre Dame for the Sunday organ concert, counting on César Franck to aid my digestion.
Taillevent, in the Rue Lamennais, was once a duke’s residence. It still has a regal feel, even when, as was the case that Monday, the owner and director, Jean-Claude Vrinat, is not around. He was off at the 50th anniversary dinner of a restaurant owners group that his father helped found. “If you write anything about Taillevent,” he said in a note he left for me, “I hope you don’t say it was better when I was not there.”
No way, Jean-Claude. My wife and I were in the hands of the affable Jean-Marie Ancher, a solidly built, easygoing captain who can make guests feel at home in half a dozen languages and recall what they ordered 10 years ago. Like his boss, Jean-Marie has been at Taillevent all his professional life. As we left, he pulled out a slightly tattered old photo of an awkward 16-year-old in a white jacket. “Me, when I started here,” he said. “Thirty years ago.”
No need to study the menu; we ordered the spit-roasted Bresse chicken for two. It is delicious, and watching M. Ancher carve it is, as the Michelin Guide says, vaut le voyage, worth the trip.
For the wines I chose the red, a 1998 Vosne-Romanée Les Suchots, from the Domaine L’Arlot, a great wine from a not-so-great vintage. The opener I left up to the young sommelier, Manuel Peyrondet, asking only for something reasonable (under $50) in a white. His choice: a 2000 Meursault from François Jobard, a winemaker I first met many years ago while tasting with Mr. Vrinat in Burgundy, a trip I thought would be laid-back fun. But I will never forget finding myself at 7:30 a.m. on a cold autumn day, stomping my feet and trying to concentrate on a little glass of new wine in Mr. Jobard’s freezing cellar.
Four days after that dinner, I had lunch with another old friend, Christian Pol-Roger, who heads up the Champagne company that bears his name. Pol Roger is in Epernay, about 90 miles east of Paris. My wife had fled back to New York, so I took along a companion of many a memorable feed, a retired music critic.
Christian picked us up at the Epernay station in the mild rain that seems always to be falling in Champagne country. There was a nip in the air that justified the crackling fire in the Pol-Rogers’ hearth and made the first, welcoming bottle that much more appealing. It was the 1982 Blanc de Chardonnay Vintage Brut, 22 years old, medium-bodied and as fresh as if it had been bottled last spring. But it was just a harbinger of what was to come. With a delicious steamed bar as a backdrop—it was Friday after all—we moved to the star of the Pol Roger lineup, the Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, named after the wine’s most famous fan. Churchill, who preferred older vintages bottled in imperial pints, named a race horse Odette Pol-Roger after one of the most glamorous of the Pol-Roger women. When Churchill died, a black border was added to Pol Roger labels in his memory. We drank the 1990, a powerful wine similar to a big Bollinger.
The pièce de résistance of the Champagnes we drank that afternoon was the 1921 Vintage Brut. It was astonishingly light for a Pol Roger but perfectly balanced with not a hint of oxidization. It could easily have passed for an 8- or 10-yearold wine. Later we dipped into the 1988 Réserve Spéciale, another limited production Pol Roger, close to the Churchill in elegance but not as powerful. Before that, with the cheese, Mr. Pol-Roger produced a truly dramatic surprise, a 1911 La Tâche. My friend the music critic pronounced it the finest Burgundy he had ever experienced. I would be hard put to disagree. Mr. Pol-Roger suggested that its remarkable condition may be due partly to conditions in the Pol Roger cellars. “Our temperatures are lower than Burgundy’s,” he said.
Like the final notes of a great symphony, that exquisite 1911 was the perfect way to end an extraordinary and probably never-to-be duplicated week of great wine.
December 2004
If the Wine Is Off . . .
By FRANK J. PRIAL
Everything up until now has been amateur night. All the training, all the sweat were nothing but preparation for this moment. It’s Randolph Scott climbing out of the back cockpit and saying: “Take her up, kid. She’s all yours.”
You’re about to send back your first bottle of wine. Don’t expect much help. No one can go with you into this no man’s land. Your guests don’t know Lambrusco from Château Léoville-Poyferré. And your wife thinks it’s all nonsense anyway.
The waiter will think you are trying to impress your guests. And the wine steward, if it’s that kind of a place, may take it as a personal affront. But you think the wine is bad and you’re going to say so. So do. At best you will meet your trial with steadfastness and courage facing down your adversary like El Cordobés. At worst you can console yourself that you’ve come a long way from the days when you were afraid to order the bottle in the first place.
I still recall with shame and humiliation trying many years ago to overwhelm a young woman with savoir faire by ordering the right bottle—and coming up with Sauternes as a dinner wine. Alas, there are some things that can be learned only the hard way.
Have you ever been out with people who ordered wine, then made no fuss when it turned out to be bad? Rest assured, there is a lot of bad wine consumed by people who actually know it is poor but are afraid to say anything.
There is a way to do it, of course. It is a little ploy that seeks to involve the waiter in the painful process of rejection. Once you’ve made your fateful decision, call him over and say: “I think this wine is off.” Don’t use the word “bad.” It’s an angry word and gets people angry. On the other hand, “off” sounds slightly technical, so he might think you know something. Then quickly add: “What do you think?”
If you’re lucky, he will agree—only because he doesn’t know much more than you do. If he calls over the maître d’hôtel, you are in deeper water, but you still have some momentum on your side. In the best of all possible worlds both of them will bow deferentially, saying, “Of course sir, forgive us, we will replace it immediately.”
If they stonewall it and declare, “Seems O.K. to us,” well, there is nothing you can do but get tough. One gambit, albeit a dangerous one, is to announce loftily, “I think it’s off and I want it replaced, even if I have to pay for it.”
No place will let you pay for the first bottle, no matter how many dark looks they may direct your way. Some years ago, after three days of tasting several hundred red wines at the Los Angeles County Fair, I drove north to San Francisco where, among other places, I lunched at a dramatic but awful restaurant in the Embarcadero Center. I was served a perfectly rotten zinfandel from a highly respected winery. It was just bad.
The young woman took it away. Ten minutes later she returned to say, “The manager is a wine expert and he says the bottle is good. You don’t have to drink it but you have to pay for it.” I allowed as how I had yet another choice: to walk out. Which I did.
Of course there is another side to this coin. There are people who really do send bottles back to impress their guests, and there are people who send bottles back simply because they don’t know what a good Bordeaux tastes like.
These people are a problem for restaurateurs. The late Henri Soulé, maître d’hôtel of Le Pavillon, had a technique for the showoffs who announced their 1959 Lafite was no good. First the captain tasted the wine, then the sommelier, then the maître d’hôtel, then the great Soulé himself. By then everyone in the restaurant was watching and the Hollywood mogul or captain of industry was squirming in his seat.
Inevitably all the staff would agree that the wine was perfect. Just as inevitably, Mr. Soulé would agree to replace it, of course. It cost him money but it tamed or got rid of another obnoxious guest.
A guest who thinks a bottle is bad because he or she simply doesn’t know the taste of Bordeaux or Hermitage or Barolo is usually handled in much the same way, but less theatrically. Again, a good place will offer something else, counting on having made a friend.
The ultimate solution is, of course, to lay the whole problem on the restaurant. This is what I am eating—what should I drink with it? Let the restaurant decide.
But suppose it’s still a bad bottle? Then what? Then refer to paragraph six above. Or switch to beer.
October 1981
Just Pour, He Said, and Put a Cork in It
By FRANK J. PRIAL
In contemporary mythology, the sommelier is an unsmiling, self-important type whose role in life is to embarrass and anger as many restaurant customers as possible in the course of an evening. He—or she—rides roughshod over customer’s requests, brooks no queries and pouts when anyone questions his selections.
Then, when the put-down is done, he lurks close by to better extract a tip from another flustered diner.
It’s only a myth, of course. There may be a sommelier from hell out there somewhere, but it’s unlikely. In any case, modern restaurant clients are more worldly than their forebears and far more at home in restaurant surroundings. And the sommeliers have changed. More of them are known as wine stewards now or by some other nonthreatening title. Most of them have impressive knowledge of their métier and are eager to impart some of what they know to their clients. Many now are wine directors; they select and buy the wines they sell. They are profit centers and well aware that profits come from happy patrons.
That being said, wine service, even in the best of restaurants, is not always perfect. I find several practices rather irritating. In fact, like the Lord High Executioner, I have a little list.
First up is the “excellent choice” exchange. “I’ll have the 1982 Mouton-Rothschild,” the customer says. “Excellent choice, sir,” the sommelier replies.
“I’ll have the pooly-foosie,” a man at the next table says. “Excellent choice, sir,” the sommelier says.
I would like one day to say to him, “Dr. Pepper, please, shaken, not stirred,” just to hear, “Excellent choice” once again.
Then there is the kidnapper. I order a dozen bluepoints and a bottle of Chablis. They arrive more or less together. I taste the wine, find it acceptable and am about to go for the first oyster when the wine man says, “Let me put this in some ice for you, sir,” and disappears with my bottle. The ice bucket is either in the basement or out the kitchen door. I nurse my ounce of wine and down two more oysters before I spot my man across the room. No eye contact. He disappears again.
When half the oysters are gone, he returns with my bottle. “May I refill your glass, sir?” he asks. Before I can swallow another wineless oyster and tell him to leave the bottle, he—and it—are gone off to the ice bucket. I finish the oysters. On his next pass-by, I grab the bottle and drink it with the bread.
A variation of this outrage occurs daily in the business-class seats on airplanes. The attendant half-fills your minuscule glass with wine then disappears into the galley. The chances of a refill before touchdown are remote. The folks back in steerage probably fare better with the 15 cents worth of wine they get in the little $4 bottle.
Then there is the compulsive pourer. He or she is usually not a sommelier but a waiter, and is more nervous than compulsive. The restaurant is half empty, the manager is on the prowl and the staff wants to look busy. So this person runs up every three minutes, gives you a frozen smile and pours. Again. I like to pour my own. I’ve tried hiding my glass behind the menu. I’ve tried putting my hand over the glass. Absent lightning reflexes, I get expensive wine on the back of my hand. The server and I both pray the manager will knock off early.
The raconteur is another irritant. You’re dining tête-à-tête with a lawyer, a lover, maybe an accountant. Serious stuff. The sommelier brings the Mondavi cab you ordered. You taste distractedly and wave him off.
“You know,” he says, “I met Bob Mondavi once.” You stare at him in horror.
“Yes,” he says, “Lurleen and I—that’s my wife—we were driving up Route 29 in the Valley—that’s the Napa Valley—and we were stuck in traffic. And there was the Mondavi winery, right alongside of us. So I said to Lurleen, I said. . . .”
Your dinner partner’s fingers begin to drum. The evening is sliding downhill, gathering momentum.
“He was really a friendly guy, Bob was. . . .”
One of my favorites is the man who primes the glasses. This involves taking a bit of wine from the bottle you ordered and swirling it around in each of the glasses you will be using. It kills off errant aromas and it probably makes the rest of the wine feel at home when it hits the glass.
The first time I had this trick explained to me my comment was: “You’re kidding.” It was not well received.
Some of these antics are management-inspired and not necessarily the fault of the perpetrator. There are places where the server is not allowed to place the bottle on the table—any table—while pulling the cork. I’ve seen sommeliers wrestle with uncooperative bottles for several tense minutes and still come off with a broken cork. Many restaurants demand that the server present the customer with the cork, who has no idea what to do with it, either.
Some people smell it, some gaze at it reverently, some pass it around to their friends, some take it home, perhaps to make a bulletin board or place mats.
More and more restaurants are making wine service as casual as their dress codes. Some like Joe Allen here in New York open your bottle at the bar, plunk it down on your table and let you do the rest. The growing acceptance of screw caps in place of corks, even on premium-quality wines, will make wine service simpler and more relaxed. As more people begin to enjoy wine, they will understand that it is what’s in the bottle that counts, not how it’s served.
The days of wine rituals are coming to an end. And as Ko-Ko says in The Mikado: “And they’ll none of ’em be missed; they’ll none of ’em be missed.”
August 2003
Americans Prefer It by the Glass
By FRANK J. PRIAL
Two young women sit down at a bar. “I’ll have a cosmopolitan,” says one. “And I’ll have a glass of chardonnay,” says her friend. The second woman is doing something peculiarly American: drinking wine as a cocktail.
At bars, at parties, at receptions and family gatherings, more and more people are drinking wine the way they used to drink spirits and beer, as a social gesture. It is an American phenomenon because so few of us have ever shared the Old World tradition of wine with meals. Wine by the glass probably represents 10 percent to 12 percent of all table wine sales volume in the United States, said Jon Fredrikson, a California wine industry consultant.
There is much to be said for wine by the glass. It represents less alcohol than spirit-based drinks, and it presents the consumer with a wider variety, two or even three different wines at the same meal, if the glasses are small enough. And it can be profitable.
Even so, not everyone approves, not even in the wine trade. “It’s O.K. at the bar, I guess,” said Joe Delissio, the wine director at the River Café in Brooklyn, “but I love having a bottle of wine on the table. I’m not sure why, but I guess I like to see people sharing the wine, talking about it, not drinking it because it’s the thing to do. It just adds something to the dining experience.”
Daniel Johnnes, the wine director at Montrachet in New York and for the Myriad Restaurant Group, is not a fan of wine by the glass either. “We use fairly large glasses,” he said, “and when I pour from a bottle, I usually fill about a third of the glass. We offer a little over six ounces when we serve by the glass, or about half a glass of wine.”
“I’ve had people say, ‘Hey, fill it up; I paid for a full glass,’” he added. “That would be almost half a bottle.”
Mr. Johnnes also wondered about restaurants with extensive lists of wines by the glass. “What happens to the wine that sits around for a week because no one ordered it?” he asked. Charles Scicolone has one answer for that. He is the wine director at I Trulli, a popular Italian restaurant in Manhattan that has a separate wine bar with its own menu and a variety of wine programs. I Trulli offers eight wines by the glass in the restaurant and an impressive 50 by the glass in the wine bar.
“Most of our wines are sold in the wine bar,” he said, “where we specialize in tastings of flights of three wines.” Mr. Scicolone said a customer can order three wines from the same vintage, one wine from three different vintages, three wines from the same grape or three from the same region. “We have no problem using up all our wines,” he said.
A standard 75-centiliter wine bottle holds just over 25 ounces. At Montrachet, the Four Seasons and other top restaurants in Manhattan, that usually breaks down to about four, six-ounce glasses of wine per bottle. Four glasses of a wine usually cost a dollar or two more than a bottle of the same wine, to cover the cost of the extra service and the glassware, restaurateurs say. Which means that two people drinking two glasses each with dinner are better off ordering a bottle.
At the Four Seasons, prices for wine by the glass start at about $13 and can reach $30 or more. At Gramercy Tavern, prices start at about $6 for a Minervois from the South of France and climb to $20 for Billecart-Salmon Rosé Champagne. Gramercy Tavern also offers a three-ounce taste of each of its by-the-glass wines. A taste of the Minervois is $3.25; of the Billecart-Salmon, $10.25.
Some restaurants offer variations on the theme. Orso in Midtown, which specializes in Italian wines, offers its by-the-glass wines in little quarter-liter pitchers. A quarter of a liter is about the same as eight and a half ounces. Orso allows its patrons to sidestep the glass-versus-bottle quandary by ordering its house wine by the carafe. There are liter, half-liter and quarter-liter carafes, the last apparently the most popular. The price for a liter is usually just under the lowest-priced bottled wine, which makes the liter something of a bargain. The wine is anonymous, but the waiter can usually tell you what it is, and it will be a Rosso di Montalcino or something similar.
Lesser restaurants tend to squeeze more wine—and more profit—from each bottle of by-the-glass wine. “We generally go for five five-ounce glasses,” admitted an East Side bartender who asked not to be identified, adding, “I’ve never had any complaints.”
Most casual, bistro-style restaurants use a cheaper, smaller glass meant to hold just five or six ounces to begin with. The customer gets less wine and cheaper wine but invariably a full, or almost full glass. Customers like the woman at the bar ordering her chardonnay rarely specify a brand or label. Which means the bar or restaurant is free to offer relatively modest stuff.
Major wine producers offer wines specifically meant to be sold by the glass. E.&J. Gallo, for example, offers 18-liter casks—really, bags of wine in boxes—under the William Wycliff, Burlwood and Copper Ridge labels. Constellation, formerly known as Canandaigua, sells 18-liter casks under their Paul Masson, Almaden and Inglenook labels. Other brands are Pebble Creek, Three Oaks, Cutler Creek and Summerfield. An 18-liter cask, the equivalent of two cases of wine, costs a restaurant about $35. Sold at $6 for a five-ounce glass, casks can be immensely profitable.
Even wine poured from traditional bottles can return respectable profits when sold by the glass. The rule of thumb in the trade is that the first glass pays for the bottle. In other words, whatever the customer pays for the glass of wine is roughly what the restaurateur paid for the bottle. When a restaurateur is being particularly thrifty, eking out five glasses from a bottle of very inexpensive wine, the return on the first bottle will probably pay for the case.
There are deals for the customer, too. Many restaurants built up dangerously high wine inventories during the economic downturn. Some of them have been working off their stocks by offering exceptional wines, by the glass, at bargain prices. This is usually done quietly, and to profit from it, it helps to know something—not too much, but something—about wine.
February 2004
On Tap? How About Chardonnay
or Pinot Noir?
By ERIC ASIMOV
The bartender pulls the handle and the liquid pours forth from keg to glass with the distinctive gushing sound that has launched a zillion thirsts. Ah, yes, that fresh draft flavor—nothing like wine on tap.
Wine? On tap? Is this another attack by the same philistines who insist on screw caps, stemless glasses and other means of depriving wine lovers of their pretensions?
On the contrary, wine, stored in kegs and served through a method similar to a draft-beer line, may be the glorious future of by-the-glass pours in bars and restaurants.
It’s just a trickle right now, but the keg and tap system has successfully taken hold in restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in wine bars in the city of Napa, Calif.; in Atlanta; and in Traverse City, the heart of Michigan wine country. And it’s coming soon to New York City, to no less a place than Daniel Boulud’s downtown outpost, DBGB, tentatively scheduled to open on the Bowery in May.
“It’s the wave of the future,” said Colin Alevras, DBGB’s beverage manager, who will have 24 taps at his disposal, 22 for beer and one each for a house red and a house white. The number of wine lines may increase there, he said, if the public is receptive.
What makes wine on tap not merely good but brilliant? It’s not the tap, it’s the keg.
Taps themselves have been used for many years as part of complex preservation systems intended to protect open bottles against the demon slayer of wine, oxygen. Perhaps you’ve seen such a system, bottles in a refrigerated glass cabinet, taps on the outside, a Medusa’s tangle of hoses extending upward in an effort to rebuff the oxygen with inert gases like argon. Systems like these are an improvement over the half-empty bottle recorked behind the bar, but they are imperfect, complicated and expensive.
The bottles are a problem. Even with the best preservation system the wines don’t always stay perfectly fresh. A lot of wine is thrown away, or served in poor condition, resulting in a lesser experience at a greater price for consumers and a lot of waste for the restaurant.
“You have to calculate in your pricing the wine you didn’t sell, the wine you had to throw away,” said Sang Yoon, the chef and owner of two Father’s Office restaurants in the Los Angeles area, and a true believer in the keg and tap method. “The wine is 20 percent cheaper right off the bat.”
Mr. Yoon served wines by the glass the conventional way at his first Father’s Office in Santa Monica, where his fanatical pursuit of top-quality ingredients and superb craft beers, along with an autocratic style (“no substitutions, modifications, alterations or deletions,” the menu reads) turned his little bar into a cult restaurant. But he wanted something better for the wine when he opened his second restaurant, in Culver City.
“I can’t remember having had a positive wine-by-the-glass experience unless the bottle was freshly opened,” he said. “As an owner, you also come to realize how wasteful wine by the glass becomes. As a result your pricing has to reflect that waste, so most places serve cheap wine with big markups for glass pours, which equals bad value for consumers.”
Then it hit him. “Why can’t we just serve good wine out of a keg like we do with beer?” he said. In kegs, which keep out the air, wine could stay perfectly fresh for months, he reasoned. Mr. Yoon found a restaurant in Atlanta that was serving wine from modified beer kegs, and, with an energy born of obsession, he set out to perfect the system.
He found a treasure-trove of five-gallon soda kegs, big enough to hold about 25 bottles of wine each, no longer used by the bottlers, who had turned to bagin-box containers. He worked to persuade wineries to fill the stainless steel kegs for him. And he custom-designed coolers for the wine kegs, separate from the cooling system he used for the 36 beers he offers on tap.
“Whites are kept at 46 degrees, and reds 55 degrees,” he said. “Once the wines hit the glass, the temperature rises about two degrees, thus bringing the actual service temperature to 48 and 57 respectively. I did a lot of testing.”
Mr. Yoon now offers eight wines on tap, including wines from Brewer-Clifton, Melville, Stephen Ross and Flowers, and with the reusable kegs he estimates he saves having to dispose of 10,000 bottles and related packaging a year.
It was on a scouting trip to Los Angeles last year that Mr. Alevras of DBGB visited Father’s Office to look at Mr. Yoon’s beer system. He came away fascinated by wines in kegs.
“It’s beautiful in its simplicity,” he said. “Gas goes in as wine goes out.”
Gas? Well, of course. That’s how a beer keg works. Except beer systems generally use a high-pressure carbon dioxide system, which carbonates the beer. Wine simply needs a low-pressure system in which gas pushes the wine from keg to tap and occupies the empty space in the keg, preventing oxidation. Mr. Yoon uses nitrogen, which the restaurant produces itself with a reverse osmosis generator.
While Mr. Yoon may have improved the system, he by no means invented it. For centuries in the ancient wine-producing regions of the world, a barrel and a tap method was the low-tech way to dispense wines in countless bars and taverns. Even today, you see wine on tap frequently in Europe, even if it doesn’t have the sleek 21st-century perfectionism of Mr. Yoon’s system.
Europe was the inspiration for Craig and Anne Stoll, the owners of Delfina in San Francisco. In their new pizzeria, which opened in October, they serve vino alla spina, as wine on tap is called in Italy.
At Oxbow Wine Merchant, a retail shop and wine bar in Napa, Peter Granoff is going through two 15-gallon kegs of white wine a month.
“We can pour a very nice glass of wine, five ounces, for $4 or $5,” said Mr. Granoff, an owner. “There are no packaging costs, the kegs get used over and over. No corks, no capsules. I would guess the consumer savings is 25 or 30 percent, depending on the wine.”
Gillian Ballance, the wine director at the Carneros Inn in the Napa Valley, was intrigued enough by what she saw at Oxbow to put in a tap at Farm, one of the inn’s restaurants, about three months ago. She’s now serving verdelho from Scholium Project for $6 a glass.
Is wine by the keg a novelty? Or is this just the beginning of a trend that will benefit purveyors and consumers? It makes too much economic sense, I think, for it not to take hold.
But it won’t happen overnight. While the technology is not new or experimental, existing beer lines cannot simply be converted for wine. It’s far easier, restaurateurs say, to install wine lines to begin with, preferably during construction. “You can retrofit almost anything,” Mr. Granoff said, “but it gets really expensive.”
So far the public seems to be embracing wines on tap, although Mr. Granoff isn’t taking chances. He likes to offer customers a glass to taste, and tells them only after they try it how the wine was dispensed.
“Their jaws kind of drop,” he said. “You’ve gotten past their perception, by giving them the wine without telling them where it’s coming from.”
April 2009
Sometimes, Half a Bottle Is Better Than One
By WILLIAM GRIMES
She’s ordered oysters. He’s ordered foie gras. The sommelier approaches. Tension mounts. What wine?
This question haunts the thinking portion of humankind. The lone diner searches futilely for a wine that will split the difference between a delicate shellfish appetizer, hard-wired for Chablis, and a lusty, truffly main course that has red Burgundy written all over it. For two diners, a bottle each of red and white is too much to drink. In most restaurants, the wines served by the glass are too humble to make a serious contribution to the meal.
Unlike the mind-body problem, the meat-fish problem has a solution. It’s the half bottle, and against the odds it seems to be making a comeback in New York restaurants, for common-sense reasons. At a time when Americans are drinking less, the half-bottle format allows diners to get quality without quantity. It allows customers who yearn for adventure to experiment without going into debt, and because wine ages more quickly in half bottles, younger wines show better.
“I am always looking for half bottles,” said Dr. William Schlansky, a dentist from Brooklyn who eats out four nights a week. He likes wine. His wife drinks very little. “We find a full bottle is a little much, but I don’t like wine by the glass,” he said. “I feel you’re drinking what they pick for you.”
Veritas, a new wine-theme restaurant, carries 30 half bottles now and is adding to the list daily, with about 100 as the goal. John Gilman, the new sommelier at Picholine, is expanding the restaurant’s selection of half bottles. “I looked at the list here and said, ‘We’ve got to get more,’” he said. “We have a specific need with our cheese course.” At Gotham Bar and Grill, his previous employer, Mr. Gilman worked with a list of 60 half bottles, one of the biggest in New York.
Half bottles also dovetail nicely with tasting menus, making it possible for a table to match four or five different wines with a multicourse meal. “On any given evening, we may have as many as five tasting menus circulating on the floor,” said Joseph Nase, the wine director at Lespinasse. “That’s a golden opportunity to pair wines and establish themes for the meal.”
Mr. Nase usually carries 100 to 150 half bottles. He is currently reworking his wine list so that he can offer 200 to 250 half bottles, a monster list.
French restaurants like La Côte Basque, La Caravelle and La Grenouille have always carried well-chosen half-bottle lists of perhaps 15 or 20 wines. Peacock Alley at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel offers 30. But the half-bottle habit is being picked up by more modest restaurants, like Cafe Centro, the Tonic, and Chelsea Bistro and Bar, which all have about 20 half bottles on their lists. Coup, a restaurant in the East Village, maintains a carefully pruned list of only 25 wines in bottle. Eight are half bottles.
“Things are on the upswing of late,” said Mr. Gilman of Picholine. “Producers and importers are making an effort to get better wines into half bottles.”
Even so, the diner in the market for a good half bottle often seaches in vain, because most winemakers hate the format, with some reason. Glassmakers charge a premium for the bottles, and filling them often requires a separate bottling line. As a result, supplies tend to be very limited.
There are virtually no wines from Australia, New Zealand or South America in half bottles. Almost all half-bottle lists are made up of French, Italian and American wines, with a few German and Spanish wines. Within France, the winemakers of Burgundy have traditionally been reluctant to use half bottles, while their counterparts in Bordeaux have not.
When half-bottle cases are available, they sell for as much as 20 percent more than the equivalent amount of wine in full bottles, which gives a restaurant owner two choices: accept a lower profit or invite customer complaints about half bottles that cost more than half the amount of a full bottle.
Another reason for winemakers’ reluctance to use half bottles has to do with the way wine ages. Because all bottles have the same amount of air between the cork and the surface of the wine, the ratio of air to wine is quite different for a half bottle, a full bottle and a magnum. Half bottles age more quickly, and some winemakers are nervous about putting their best stuff into an inferior vehicle.
They may be worrying needlessly. When Eberhard Müller took over as the executive chef at Lutèce, he searched the cellar and came across several half-bottle cases of top Bordeaux dating from the 1930s and 1940s, about 400 bottles in all. “I was worried about their well-being, but to my surprise every single one was in perfect condition,” Mr. Muller said.
Alas, only one bottle remains, a 1949 Lafite-Rothschild priced at $400. The restaurant does have a startling lineup of 11 Mouton-Rothschilds from 1979 to 1989, however, priced from $110 for the 1981 to $775 for the 1982.
A half-bottle list does not need a first-growth Bordeaux, or lofty prices, to command interest. Le Cirque 2000 has a Mâcon-Lugny for $11, only $3 more than a bottle of sparkling water. Windows on the World and Gotham Bar and Grill have both given their lists a distinctly American accent, while restaurants like Montrachet, Daniel, the Tonic and Patroon have created distinctive personalities for their lists by searching out unusual selections.
“With a number of producers you can reserve and get half bottles, or you can ask the importer to put in a request,” said Daniel Johnnes, the wine director at Montrachet. “It does take some more effort, but to have a good list, you have to work.”
The diner jaded by overexposure to half bottles from big producers like Sonoma-Cutrer, Trefethen or Robert Mondavi can get a new lease on life at the Tonic, where the 21-bottle list includes a Sancerre from Lucien Crochet, a Bandol rosé from Domaine Tempier and a merlot from Georis in Monterey County.
Jean-Luc Le Dû, the sommelier at Daniel, has introduced quirks that match the cooking of Daniel Boulud, the restaurant’s owner and executive chef, demoting Bordeaux and promoting wines from Burgundy and the Rhône. “I think his flavors require something more assertive than the cabernet grape,” Mr. Le Dû said.
In the ideal meal, as conceived by Mr. Le Dû, a guest might start with a shellfish course paired with a half bottle of Savennières, move on to fish and a more substantial St.-Aubin from Burgundy, ease into a red Burgundy like Morey-St.-Denis when the meat makes an appearance, and finish strong with a big Côte Rôtie from the Rhône.
“It’s a little more work for us than if someone simply orders a bottle of white and a bottle of red, but that way doesn’t fit as well with the philosophy of the restaurant,” Mr. Le Dû said.
One meal. Four wines. It’s true: less really is more.
February 1999
Of Wine, Haste and Religion
By ROGER COHEN
I was dining the other night with a colleague, enjoying a respectable Russian River pinot noir, when he said with a steely firmness: “We’ll pour our own wine, thank you.”
This declaration of independence was prompted by that quintessential New York restaurant phenomenon: a server reducing a bottle of wine to a seven-minute, four-glass experience through overfilling and topping-up of a fanaticism found rarely outside the Middle East.
I know I’m being elitist here, a terrible thing in this political season, and quite possibly nobody in small-town Pennsylvania gives a damn how wine is poured. But I don’t care and, come to think of it, last time I was in small-town Pennsylvania—at Gettysburg—I drank rather well.
Acceptable cappuccino was also available throughout the commonwealth at Dunkin’ Donuts outlets, which makes one wonder if liberal elitism really begins and ends in Cambridge, Hyde Park and Berkeley these days. I even saw a Volvo somewhere west of Harrisburg.
But that’s another story, albeit important, of seeping American sophistication-cum-Europeanization.
The liberation I felt at my colleague’s I’ll-pour boldness was intoxicating. That’s right, I thought, we need to take our lives back. Drinking at your own pace is the best revenge.
It’s humiliating to pay through the nose and suffer at affronts to good taste. Wine should glide, not glug, from a tilted, not tipped, bottle. The time that goes into the making of it should be reflected in the time it takes to drink.
That’s so obvious that I got to wondering why wine glasses, even at fine New York tables, get filled almost to the brim, and refilled to that unseemly level, every time you’re distracted from Second Amendment–authorized armed guard of your receptacle.
As with many things, there’s a generous view and a mean one.
The kind interpretation would be that, through a gross misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure, servers and the restaurant managers behind them are convinced that solicitude is measured by the regularity with which a glass is topped up.
The uncharitable view would be that, guided by an acute understanding of the nature of commerce, servers are told by restaurant managers to hustle clients through a meal and as many bottles of wine as possible.
After long reflection, of at least 12 seconds, as measured on my elitist Rolex, I’ve decided the second theory is more convincing.
It’s more plausible partly because it tracks with another unhappy New York dining phenomenon at some remove from the languorous pleasures of Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe. I refer to the vacuuming away of your plate, at about the speed of light, the second you are deemed to have consumed the last mouthful.
Just as you prepare to dab bread into the unctuous leftover sauce from those slide-from-the-bone short ribs, the plate vanishes. The fact that others around the table may still be eating—and to be without a plate is to feel naked in such circumstances—does not trouble the stealthy masters of this Houdini routine.
As usual, in such matters, the French have it right. If you deconstruct the leftover, you find something that’s yours, a little messy, even mucky, but yours. No wonder there’s pleasure in poking around in it a little. Manet’s revelers are surrounded by their picnic leftovers. Nobody’s whisked them away.
In the same way, that mix of soil, hearth and tradition the French call “terroir” is personal. You poke around in it and discover that some ineffable mix of the land, its particular characteristics, and a unique human bond has found expression in a wine—not a “cabernet” or a “pinot” or a “merlot” but, say, a Chambolle-Musigny Derrière La Grange.
That’s because “derrière la grange”—behind the barn—a small parcel of land produces a Burgundy distinct from another 50 yards away. Discovering this takes time, just as it takes time after bottling—perhaps a decade—for fruit, tannin and acidity to attain their full harmony.
American wine is rushed onto the table, as well as into the glass. Most is drunk five to 10 years too early. But, hey, this is a country in a hurry: Google’s founders made a couple of billion dollars overnight last week, an un-French achievement. This is a great nation.
Perhaps it’s so great I should wear an American flag lapel pin. Perhaps it’s so great I should put myself in a duck blind this weekend. Perhaps it’s so great I should join the great U.S. blood sport of anti-intellectualism. Perhaps it’s so great I should go bowling more often. Perhaps it’s so great I should stop praising France and conceal the fact I speak French.
But I don’t want to grow bitter. Maybe I’ll just cling—yes, cling—to my glass and the religion that’s in it.
April 2008
A Stroll Through the “21” List, Circa 1945
By FRANK J. PRIAL
The restaurant consultant Roger Martin began a long career in New York restaurants by checking coats at the “21” Club in the early 1950s while still a New York University student. Mr. Martin, who died on Dec. 4, went on to work for Restaurant Associates and Windows on the World, and for a time he ran his own place in the Hamptons.
Last spring, when Food Arts magazine ran an excerpt from his memoirs, about his “21” days, it reminded me that somewhere I had my own “21” memento, a copy of the club’s wine list from 1945, when it was known as Jack & Charlie’s “21.” I pulled it out.
Today, greasy spoons have wine lists. Fifty years ago, New York was a steakand-potatoes town for the most part and wine sophistication, such as it was, was confined to a handful of restaurants and a couple of European-style hotels. The “21” Club was one of those places. Its celebrity-laden clientele may have consisted largely of whiskey drinkers and martini addicts, but the club was proud of its wine cellar.
In 1945, any wine list was bound to be mostly French. The “21” list was no exception. But long before anyone else did it, “21” also offered wines from Italy, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Chile and Switzerland. And, yes, the United States.
Nowadays, recent vintages will predominate. Anything more than eight years old is special. In 1945, just the opposite was true. The youngest Bordeaux on the “21” list were nine years old—from 1936—and many dated from the 1920s. In fact, it could hardly have been otherwise. World War II had ended earlier that year. Some of the best vineyards in Europe had been devastated, and wine shipments had virtually come to a halt.
California and New York, which might have been expected to fill the void, had only begun to make fine wine in the 1930s and ’40s, and very few people in watering holes like “21” were inclined to drink it.
So “21” was selling its old wines, and what wines they were. Château Lafite-Rothschild 1934 was $11; so were the 1933 and the 1928. The 1924 was $9.50 and the 1920, a 25-year-old wine, was $14. The 1934 Haut-Brion was $10. The 1920 was $12.50 and the 1916 a dollar less.
A magnum of Château Latour from the memorable 1929 vintage was $23 and a magnum of Château Margaux was $21, but a magnum of Mouton-Rothschild, listed among the Second Growths because it would not become a First Growth for another 28 years, was $25.
The depth of the restaurant’s Bordeaux cellar was exceptional: five vintages of Château Brane-Cantenac, the youngest being 1929; six of Gruaud Larose; five of Pichon-Longueville; six of Château Margaux going back to 1904 ($17.50); and eight vintages of the famous Sauternes Château d’Yquem, from 1936 back to 1919, ranging in price from $8 for the 1936 to $18 for the 1920.
A separate cellar held truly old Bordeaux, including the 1865 Lafite, made three years before Baron James Rothschild bought the estate, and Mouton-Rothschild 1869, made 16 years after Mouton had become Rothschild property.
The Burgundy list was long and distinguished, with great wines like a 1934 Chambertin from Liger-Belair and a 1929 Clos de Vougeot 1929 from Mugnier priced at $8 and $11 respectively. The most expensive of the Burgundies was a 1929 Romanée-Conti from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti for $18. Surprisingly, Beaujolais was not much cheaper than Burgundy. A 1933 Beaujolais was $7, a 1926 Fleurie $7.50, the same price as a 1928 Beaune or a 1934 Pommard Rugiens.
Wine drinkers who are just now beginning to discover German wines would be fascinated by the six pages of German rieslings “21” offered 58 years ago. On average, they were priced two to three dollars more per bottle than the Bordeaux. True, there were 15 Liebfraumilch, but there were dozens of fine estate wines under $15 and a priceless spätlese Moselle, a 1934 Bernkasteler Doktor, Dr. Thanisch, for $18.
Bear in mind that a full dinner at “21” might cost as little as $15 in 1945, and working men and women paid 35 or 50 cents for an adequate lunch at the Automat. Inflation would bring all of these fantasy prices more in line with what we must pay for these wines today. The Bernkasteler Doktor from a current vintage would sell for close to $100 in a restaurant, while contemporary versions of many of those $10 and $11 Bordeaux sell for $200 and more.
Most intriguing to me were the listings in the American wine section part of the old “21” list. Inglenook, Beaulieu Vineyards, Louis M. Martini and Wente Brothers are all represented. There is a nonvintage B.V. cabernet, four different cabernets from Martini and a sauvignon blanc from Wente. Inglenook is represented by a white wine and not by one of its memorable prewar cabernets. New York is represented by American grapes like Niagara, Delaware and Elvira, from Widmer’s Wine Cellars in what the list spells as the “Canadaigua District.”
The restaurant must have been nervous about offering American wines. Napa rieslings were described as “Alsatian type,” a Wente chardonnay as a “Burgundy type” and a Martini cabernet from Santa Clara as a “Château Latour type.” The Beaulieu Vineyards B.V. cabernet (Bordeaux type) sold for $3; most of the other American wines for about $4.
These days at “21,” $4 might get you a big smile from the coat checker, but not much more.
January 2003