Just Give Me a Glass of Your House White
Published by Bill October 11th, 2006 in Grape Gripes.We’re your customers. That’s right, we pay your bills - so listen up. Why can’t we understand your wine list? We know what we like, but your wine list doesn’t give us a clue. Ok, so we’re not wine knowledgeable, don’t hate us because we’d still like some wine that we’ll enjoy. We really like wine, especially with a good meal. But we don’t want to study the stuff so we can understand your wine list and know how a wine will taste.
Count these: 1) County of Origin, 2) Producer, 3) Vintage date, 4) Appellation, 5) Variety of Grape, 6) Vineyard, and 7) season the grapes were picked (Ice Wine, Late Harvest, etc.). That’s right, seven items of information must be catalogued and understood to give us a chance at knowing what a wine tastes like when reading your traditional wine list. Keep six of these, change the seventh, and all bets are off on how the wine will taste. We get as confused as a blind dog in a meat house.
If you hear a lot of us saying, “Just give me a glass of your house white,” you have a wine list problem. Hey, we’re not too cheap to buy a bottle of wine; we just don’t want to make a sizeable investment in a bottle we may not like. So why keep us in the dark, trying to decipher your wine list code? Why not tell us how the wine tastes, and we’ll pop for a bottle or two.
Expensive restaurants once solved this problem with a sommelier whose job it was to discern our taste preference, analyze the menu we’ve ordered, and recommend a wine we would enjoy with our meal. There are precious few qualified sommeliers around these days, especially in affordable restaurants. When your wait staff recommends, it’s usually wines they like.
The only thing worse than a traditional wine list is one filled with “winese” puffery descriptions. Example: “This wine has hints of dark tree fruit, root vegetable, autumn leaves, pears, berries and vanilla, with a strong finish of cigar box.” Amazing! Do you have something that tastes like wine?
In January of 1980, Grey Moss Inn in Grey Forrest, Texas, implemented the “Customer Friendly Wine List.” Customers could order wines by the way they taste for the first time ever. The wine list was divided into categories:
1) Slightly Sweet, Light, Soft
2) Light, Crisp, Fruity
3) Fuller, Rounded, Dry
4) Elegance, Finesse
5) Robust, Complex, Full Flavored
6) After Dinner Sweet
Red, white and rose wines all appeared in most categories. Some wines like Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon appeared under as many as three categories. As customers, we knew that by staying within a category we could be experimental ordering wine and still enjoy our selection.
Jill Goolden published the book, The Taste of Wine, around 1900, and about a decade later Fiona Beckett published Wines by Style. The thesis of these books is to classify wine by how it tastes, rather than the seven criteria above. These books led to a rash of wine lists offering up their contents by taste profile - but these glimmering lights seem to be flickering out.
If you lack the confidence to develop a wine list for your restaurant that lets us order wines by the way they taste, hire a qualified wine consultant, or work closely with your vendors to achieve your goal. Then watch your wines sales grow from glasses to bottles, as we feel comfortable ordering from your list.
5 Responses to “Just Give Me a Glass of Your House White”
Leave a Reply
You must login to post a comment.
I always order wine by taste, and the taste I like is dry, not sweet, in every wine I drink, from Cabernet to Chardonnay. I went to The Contessa Hotel restaurant on the San Antonio River Walk the other day. It served Spanish food (from Spain), and it had a great wine list and knowledgeable waiter who helped us order a great red wine. I wish now that I had remembered what it was. But I DO remember the restaurant and the wait staff and will go there again.
I hate to say this, but… Americans can learn a lot about wine in restaurants from the Italians!
When in Italy, always ask your waiter if there is a house wine. Invaribly, Italian restaurants will offer a house wine at around $10.00 Euros to $12.50 Euros that will compete with any of the $60.00 Euro bottles on the wine list. If you feel compeled to spend more, go ahead. But, you’ll spend more for not that much better wine.
American restaurants would do well to nuture and offer their own, reasonable house wine.
The glass of “house white”. What a misnomer. So many establishments take this opportunity to sell you a glass of rather inferior product for $4.00–$5.00 per glass. If they happen to offer better wines by the glass, then it jumps to $7.00–$9.00 per glass. This is offensive. Rather than encourage patrons to experiment with new wines and food pairings, the restaurants seem to punish customers with their price structure. Maybe they just do not care and are merely attempting to maximize profit. Too bad. These restaurants rarely make my list of frequent stops.
White wines should always be served at proper celler temperature, I hate when restaurants serve these at room temperature and expect to offer the best expression of the wine.
I’m am wine impaired. I love wine, but I’m ignorant. I know what I like and I like what I know. I just can’t quite taste all those fruits, herbs, and woods. If I’m searching for that faint undertone of oak, I guess I should be outside chewing on a tree while gulping my favorite white of the week. That said, restaurant wine lists are indeed confusing and overwhelming. It shouldn’t take me 30 miinutes to peruse the list. As suggested, there should be a more simplified, categoric method of going through the list. Grey Moss Inn has a wonderful system, which I wish could become the standard. Alternatively, for a small or new restaurant that is just having enough problems finding waitstaff and a sommelier isn’t in the cards, I would suggest hiring a consultant to pair wines with menu items. I have a couple of my favorite restaurants that have suggested wine selections on the menu opposite each menu item… listed in order of price. What a great concept for the wine-impaired such as myself. I already know that the suggested wines are stocked in their cellar and have been (hopefully) picked to enhance the menu choice (or sometimes it’s the other way around with me…. wine to compliment food or food to compliment wine). This gives me an opportunity to try new wines that I haven’t tried, paired with foods that bring out the best in the wine (or vice versa…. where was I?). I think any up and coming restaurant should make a small initial investment in a good wine consultant to help match menu items with their wines, put the wines on the menu right there with the menu item, and stock their cellar accordingly. Suggested beers, cordials, and dessert pairings would really complete my fantasy.
But, forget all of this. Bass Pro Shops officially opens in San Antonio in less than 24 hours… food and wine are on the backburner.