How to handle a wine list - 10 questions you’ve always wanted answered

Former sommelier Zeren Wilson of Bitten & Written reveals the tricks of the trade when it comes to choosing a good value wine and how to handle the somm.

“Being handed the wine list in a restaurant is such a simple act, a seemingly mundane plonking of pages into someone’s hands, yet carries with it an unspoken social dance with factors including fear, power, and assumption needing to be negotiated.

Firstly, who gets handed the list? In a group, a leader will emerge, brave and strong, and take on this weighty (often onerous) task. “You know about wine, you choose...”, will be uttered by someone, and if that somebody is you, the answer “no I don’t”, won’t quite cut it.

None of us will know every single wine on a list, but there are a few universal truths that can be handy to recall when the pressure is on and that leather bound tome lands in your lap . . .

What are the best value wines on a list?

Some wine regions absolutely offer better value pound for pound, (or dollar for dollar), and it’s useful to have a few of these in the mental locker when you have a particular price ceiling that you don’t want to smash through.

Firstly, German Riesling. Over a hundred years ago the finest wines of Germany were fetching higher prices than top Bordeaux. The stigma of poor wines being made a few decades ago is still being shaken off, making these wines undervalued and underrated, even now. A Riesling Kabinett Trocken will knock many other dry whites outta the park for quality/value, but do ask how dry it is, as styles can still vary: £25-30 should get you something very good indeed.

The South-West and the Languedoc-Roussillon area of Southern France are wonderful hunting grounds to plunder for consistent, crowd pleasing reds, with appellations such as Bergerac, Cahors, Fronton and Gaillac offering great value: £20-30 spent here will reward greatly.

The wines of Ribera del Duero tend to deliver a bit more value than better known Rioja, and Argentinian Malbec is a great option as you’re pretty much guaranteed a good slug of dark, supple fruit which tends to be a little more interesting than Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot at a similar price point.

Southern Italian wines from Puglia and Sicily often occupy the first few listings, and with good reason — consistent wines from reliable climates, produced in good volumes, creating decent value.

Are there any types of wines you should avoid?

Red Burgundy is perhaps the most fruitless of buying gambles on a restaurant wine list. Firstly, you can almost discount anything immediately under £30 (rare exceptions), and secondly, the fragile Pinot Noir grape is notoriously moody, greatly susceptible to vintage variations, and sometimes even the same wine will perform/taste differently on a different day.

The ‘heartbreak’ grape is well named. If you know a Burgundy grower you like, you’re on the path to getting something you’ll enjoy, but blindly buying a Nuits-St-Georges because you “once enjoyed one”, is a recipe for getting burned: hundreds of different growers, each with their own vineyard plots and differing styles.

My beloved California offers very little value on the whole under £50, and is best left for bigger budgets and more lavish days (I can’t be trusted in front of good Californian wine list, the budget being tossed to the four winds...)

Is it a good idea to buy wine by the glass?

Quite simply, if you’re having one glass of a particular wine, yes. It’s the opportunity to try a few different wines, and if the by the glass list is extensive, this can be a joy.

If there are more than two of you, then as a general rule, no. Restaurants tend to make a slightly higher margin on by the glass sales (to create a buffer for wastage of wine not sold), so be bold, be brave, make a decision on wine everyone should like, and order a whole bottle (or two) for maximum value.

Is it safe to order the house wine?

Good restaurants have good house wine, and in many ways the quality of the entry point on a list says a lot about the ambitions of the venue. It’s a lot more satisfying to source and list a cracking house wine, and it’s a source of pride for those curating good wine lists.

The oft quoted “choose the second wine up” rule should be kicked into row Z though.

Can you trust a sommelier? Won’t they always get you to spend more than you want?

Perhaps. But in the main, no. The real joy of the role (and one I enjoyed greatly at Zucca in Bermondsey, which has a fantastic list), is gauging the needs of the diner (style/budget/occasion) and plucking something out that ticks all the boxes, makes them smile, and enhances the experience.

When the job is performed really well, the trust created between diner and sommelier can be a magical thing, the sommelier leading the way and pouring exactly what the diner had in mind.

Selling more expensive wine won’t benefit the sommelier, they’re not City traders working on a commission. Trust them, ask questions, engage: it’s what they are there for.

Why do restaurants charge such big mark-ups?

Do they really? One of the fallacies about wine pricing in a restaurant is that somehow you’re being “fleeced”. The restaurant game may be glamorous from the outside, a riot of fun times and carousing, but ultimately it’s still bloody hard to make money from this industry, and history is littered with ‘crash and burn’ restaurants.

There’s only so far you can push your margins on food, and if you’re using great ingredients, even less so. The wine list is one of the few areas where some margin can be clawed back.

But hang on a minute, we’re not just paying for the wine. Staff have to be employed, a restaurant has to be kitted out, premiums and rent have to be paid (landlords, as elsewhere, can be vicious), glasses have to be bought (breakages, breakages), and so it goes on.

We’re paying for the whole package, the experience, the fun times, and shouldn’t be too churlish when we see a restaurant wanting to make a bit of money. Want your restaurant to stay open? Help a brother out, man...

How do you chose a wine if everyone’s ordering different dishes?

I wouldn’t be too precious about this. Although, it will of course depend on the crowd you’re with. Despite the wonderful intricacies and ‘lightbulb’ moment food and wine matches, it’s more important to choose a style of wine that most people are happy with and go with it. No meal was ever ruined by the wine not matching perfectly.

Do I need to worry about vintages?

For most of us, no. The only time when this kind of detail should start impacting on your wine list decisions is when you’re shelling out serious wonga on wines like fine Burgundy, Bordeaux, or Champagne, where vintage fluctuations can be dramatic and palate defining.

As a very broad generalisation, New World wines now tend to be so consistent across vintages, that only the most supercilious wine nerd (I count myself amongst this tedious crowd) will genuinely have their experience impacted by a ‘lesser’ vintage. Get thee behind me, vintages...

What should I be looking for when I taste the wine (i.e. if it’s faulty)?

The most common wine fault remains the compound 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (catchy name), or TCA as it is handily abbreviated, having been transferred by or through the cork itself, its giveaway odour being varying degrees of ‘damp cellar’, ‘mouldy newspaper’, ‘damp cloth’, ‘wet dog’. This is the ‘corked’ wine of ill repute.

Sometimes a wine is horrifically corked and undrinkable, most often less severe with each person’s sensitivity to its tell-tale signs differing, making for hours of fun involving “is it corked, I don’t think it’s corked?” exchanges.

TCA dulls the fruit character of a wine, and at times the only way you’re certain is if you’ve had that exact wine before, and it behaves like a shy, muted version of its former self.

The other most common fault detectable in a wine will be oxidation, a wine that is too far down the path to its ultimate destiny of becoming vinegar. However, in these days of the ‘natural wine’ movement, with reduced levels of sulphur being used (which help protect wine against premature oxidation), the lines have become blurred about what is acceptable. Wine geeks step forth and argue amongst yourselves...

What do I do if I don’t like the wine? Do I have a right to get them to change it?

You have the right to express dissatisfaction with any part of your meal, and that includes the wine — you’re the paying customer, after all. I would suggest you do this before you’ve necked the whole bottle. Even more so if that bottle happened to be Château Latour 1982. Good luck with having that taken off your bill...

Zeren Wilson is a food and wine writer with his own blog Bitten & Written and a new contributor to matchingfoodandwine.com.

Top image © by Negative Space

Graze: food and wine matching at the London Restaurant Festival

If you’re the sort who likes to nick food off your partner’s plate - and even off friends' on the other side of the table (mea culpa) - you’ll love the idea of Graze, this year’s new feature at the London Restaurant Festival this autumn which features six of London’s most foodie streets including Exmouth Market, Bermondsey Street, Brixton Village and Marylebone High Street.

The idea is that you buy a Graze keyring - or two - at £12.50 each or £20 for a pair - then present it for a dish and a matching drink at one of the participating restaurants which should be priced at about £6. There are also weekend passes for Soho

We road-tested four of the six in Exmouth Market including Canteen, Moro, Morito and Medcalf before we gave up, utterly stuffed. The other two are Bincho and La Porchetta.

Morito I think got the prize for the evening not just because it offered two dishes each (I'm not that greedy) but because one of them, a beetroot purée called borani (right) was just so beautiful. (The other was a bowl of deep-fried chitterlings and the wine, a rustic tempranillo). Apparently you can find the recipe in Sam and Sam Clark’s Moro East.

Next door at Moro we were offered a glass of chilled fino with a deconstructed tuna kibbe served on a lettuce leaf like the Thai dish laab (not quite so sure about that one).

Moro is also celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, believe it or not, cooking dishes from the opening menu for three weeks from 23rd July-August 12th including crab brik with harissa and lemon and wood roasted pork with patatas pobres and churrasco sauce Unfortunately I’m going to be away but I still remember being absolutely blown away by the food. It’s hard to recall how revolutionary it was then.

I’d been meaning to go to Medcalf next door for a while so it was good to give it a try - one of the objectives of Graze, I imagine. They offered a great grazing dish of bavette and chips and grilled lamb with beans (right) together with a glass of merlot.

Then back to Caravan, which I’d visited a couple of times before for breakfast but never tried in the evening, for grilled quail with sumac and Casa Lapostolle Pinot. (I note we ate a lot of meat. Maybe it was the weather which was chucking it down. It can’t be worse in October.)

Anyway you can do this for yourself once the Festival begins on October 1st (actually you can buy the keyrings now on the festival website It’s probably also worth signing up for the newsletter so you don’t miss out on some of the other events which from past experience sell out pretty quickly. Especially the ones that involve celebrity chefs.

 

Gordon Ramsay opens a steak restaurant. Nobu unveils his new hotel. A typical day in Las Vegas . . .

For a town that’s still more noted for gaming than food, Las Vegas can certainly pull in the big names. Yesterday Gordon Ramsay opened his first restaurant in the city at Paris, Las Vegas while Nobu unveiled plans for his first hotel at Caesar’s Palace.

For those more used to Ramsay’s high end eateries at the Savoy and in Hospital Road, Chelsea Gordon Ramsay Steak might come as a bit of a shock. First of all it’s in the middle of a Parisian-themed casino under a fake Eiffel Tower (nothing remarkable about that: many of Vegas’s top restaurants sit cheek by jowl with several hundred slot machines).

A tubular entrace, designed to simulate the channel tunnel, brings you into a large room with a vast Union Jack on the ceiling and an angry red squiggle of a light sculpture. I assumed it was inspired by Gordon’s language but it's apparently a representation of his hand movements when making his signature dish of beef Wellington.

There is a tiered chrome steak trolley with a perch for each cut with a mirror behind to enable you to appreciate the marbling. “Every guest will receive a visit from this trolley” we were earnestly assured by one of the suits behind the restaurant. It was hard to keep a straight face.

We got to sample the Beef Wellington (very good) and two other dishes including a cute version of Caesar salad made with mini soft-boiled Scotch eggs and an impeccable sticky toffee pudding. Other dishes such as 'Colorado lamb chop complimented by flavors of Shepherd's Pie, lamb meatballs, peas, carrots and potato puree' give gastropub staples an upmarket Ramsay-esque twist. Still others like British ale onion soup made with Boddington’s and smoked beef tartare with Guinness-infused mustard seeds, feature beer as an ingredient. A big play is being made of Ramsay’s love of ale.

Some locals were surprised to see Ramsay in Paris, Las Vegas rather than in one of the more glamourous hotels but at least he hasn’t any competition from the other big names there and there are rumours of another opening within the Caesar’s Palace stable soon.

It was an uncharacteristically humble appearance from Ramsay who admitted he’d ‘made mistakes’ in the past. “Look, everyone thinks Vegas is a walk in the park but we’re taking nothing for granted. I’ve felt left out for many years because every top chef in the world is here."

Wasn’t he tempted to do the three Michelin style food which started his career though? A flash of the old Ramsay: “I’m not going to put my balls on the line and do fine dining! There’s incredible competition here - there’s no city which hosts so many top chefs. But pressure is always healthy."

He may be deliberately underplaying his chances. He has the virtue of a much higher profile in the states than his European rivals through programmes such as Hell’s Kitchen, “Kitchen Nightmares” and “MasterChef”. And the new restaurant will get invaluable TV exposure: the winner of the next series of Hell’s Kitchen will join the brigade.

“The American market is very personality driven” says local Vegas restaurant critic Al Mancini, who isn’t surprised Ramsay has gone for the safety of a steakhouse format. "People who watch TV want simple meat and potatoes food and chefs want young diners to feel comfortable in their restaurants.”

The key question is whether Ramsay will now be making his base in the US. His MD and fellow chef Stuart Gillies says not despite the fact that the chef has bought a multi-million pound property in Belair, Los Angeles. He still, Gillies points out, has 14 restaurants in the UK including the recently opened Bread Street Kitchen and is due to open the Union Street Café near Borough Market later this year. The kids apparently still go to school in the UK but the whole family will be in LA for the summer. It must be tempting . . .