What bugs restaurant critics about wine service

To kick off my coverage of the first Wine & Culinary International Forum in Barcelona last weekend (and while I disentangle the many complex threads on food and wine pairing) here are some highly practical points which were made by a high level panel of restaurant and wine critics including Jancis Robinson, Victor de la Serna of El Mundo and Nick Lander, restaurant critic for the Financial Times and author of the recently published The Art of the Restaurateur. (My comments in italics)

* Reds are too often served too warm. One critic said 'you should never serve a great red above 16°'. And make sure you have an ice bucket available if the customer asks for one. VLS

* Restaurants tend to be too in thrall to fashion. A few years ago it was stocking too many heavily extracted, powerful wines that don’t go well with food. Now it’s wines that taste of cider or beer [i.e. natural wines] VLS

* Chefs should make more of an effort to understand wine. “Even Ferran Adria told me he never thinks of wine when designing a dish. The younger generation of chefs think the same way. They just leave the sommelier to solve the riddle.” VLS

* Never mind climate change, restaurants need to think about customer change and the fact that far more restaurant-goers are women. It used to be that you never went to restaurants until you were 35. Now 20-35 year olds eat out regularly and it’s the young women who decide where to eat. Women are much more adventurous eaters and drinkers than their male counterparts. NL

Sommelier vanity
* If you’re matching wines to the menu are you making it absolutely clear to the customer what you’re doing - and are you doing enough to show them how easy it is to pair a glass of wine? You need to manage your sommelier’s vanity. NL [In other words don’t let them shroud the subject in mystique]

Josep Roca of El Celler de Can Roca touched on this in his presentation too.

“You have to learn, you have to listen, you have to feel.”

"You have to be sensitive to the occasion and the reason which has brought your guests to the restaurant. If people come to celebrate you cannot interrupt with 14 different drinks as we normally do. If you have someone who is elderly pouring them too many glasses of wine may leave them fatigued. You need to give them something cool and something light."

"The best pairing is not always perfect for our customers. Better a pairing that evokes a perfect moment than a perfect harmony."

Jancis also commented on this:

"I worry that the more celebrated sommeliers become there's a danger they become so famous and so successful they don’t work the floor.

And I'm concerned about how much the average consumer worries about ‘getting it right’. Would something go wrong it you ate what you wanted and drank what you wanted? You can scare people off talking about the perfect match. Wine pairing should be about options. It’s not consumer-friendly to insist on a by-the-glass pairing if what they want is to share a bottle.

(Not sure I’d go all the way with Jancis here. I think many people are looking for confident reassurance. They’re often happy to go along with a pairing the sommelier suggests in order to have a new experience. But obviously they shouldn’t be pushy about it.)

Greedy wine mark-ups
As a wineloving consumer I get weary of the extent to which wine is expected to bankroll restaurants. It’s worked for grand restaurants in the past but now people can check on their phones in an instant to see what the retail price is. And fewer and fewer customers are on generous expense accounts. JR

Don’t turn down the lights to such an extent that your customers can’t read the wine list. This recently happened to us at a celebratory meal where we were ordering good wines and resulted in the restaurant losing the opportunity to sell us a dessert wine. Poor lighting shows a lack of respect for wine. NL

Update your list regularly There’s no excuse for presenting lists with wines crossed out. Nowadays it’s easy to update and print out a new list. JR

Give everyone a wine list. Restaurants typically give them to only one person at the table but it can cause awkwardness and confusion if only one person knows the price. The easiest way to get round this is to combine the menu and the wine list. NL (Good point and so simple to do!)

How far can you go with BYO?
And a tip for for customers in response to the question “can you take your own wine to a restaurant that doesn’t do BYO? Jancis reckons you can:

“It’s obviously rude to take along wine for the whole meal but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take along a special red for the main course, for example, if you telephone first and agree corkage. And it would be courteous to offer the owner/chef/sommelier a taste."

I was invited to attend the Wine & Culinary Forum by the main sponsor, Bodegas Torres.

Is there anything that annoys you about wine service. Have our critics got it right or is it the chef's ego that's the problem not the sommelier's?!

 

Move over sommeliers, hello wine concierges (and curators)!

The news that London’s latest impossibly glitzy Russian-owned wine shop Hedonism aims to offer a ‘personal, concierge-like approach‘ according to an interview its CEO Tatiana Fokina gave the wine magazine Decanter, doesn’t come as a total surprise. The C-word has been creeping into the wine world for a while.

When I was in Bordeaux back in June I met the head sommelier of the Grand Hotel Jean-Michel Thomas (right) who with his four colleagues offers a wine concierge service to the establishment's well heeled guests. Apart from one to one tastings his services include advising customers how to set up a cellar (and even a winery), how to invest in wine (“people don’t believe in banks any more”) and conducted visits to the top chateaux. Basically anything they want. 

At Hedonism which, as wine buyer Alastair Viner told the Drinks Business, offers a level of service where "nothing is too difficult” the 12-strong team includes Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, French and Italian speakers, who are all available to visit clients in their homes.

Entering 'wine concierges' into Google I find dozens of search results - most, of course, in the states who are always ahead of the pack when it comes to riding a trend, for example Fine Wine Concierge and The Wine Concierge.

Hand in hand with concierges goes today’s other current buzzword 'curation' - professionals who pick out wines of particular interest to their clients from the millions out there. In China one entrepreneur has set up his own social wine curation club where members swop tips and can keep track on the progress of wines in their cellar. Another company Empire State Cellars is ‘curating’ a luxury wine portfolio for export to Shanghai. (Oddly a search for 'curate' on Google UK still brings up a reference to the curate’s egg - very British!)

None of these services is new, of course - they just have a different name. Merchants have bought wine for wealthy clients and monitored their cellars for years. Industry professionals have always offered private wine classes on demand and holiday companies exclusive wine tours. But with the increasing number of super-rich who need their leisure as well organised for them as their business lives it looks like wine appreciation is being taken to another level. I suspect the C-words are here to stay.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

Pairing wine with Szechuan (or Sichuan) cuisine

Just as you think you might have got to grips with matching wine with Chinese food along comes a regional cuisine like Szechuan which is twice as challenging, as I discovered at a wine dinner at Flinty Red in Bristol. Flinty Red has closed since I originally wrote this post in 2012, but the wine pairing lessons remain.

Pairing wine with Szechuan cuisine

I had already had a go at trying to find wines that would go with the fiery flavours of Szechuan cuisine at Bar Shu in Soho alongside the formidable Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Sichuan Cookery and the recently published Every Grain of Rice. I seem to remember we concluded that fruity rosé and a soft ripe Bordeaux without too much tannin were good options but it wasn’t easy.

The talented team at Flinty Red - Dom Harman, Rachel Higgens and chefs Matthew Williamson and Claire Thomson - took a different direction with the wines which were paired with the home-style dishes of Lily Wang of the Szechuan capital, Chengdu, who happens to be Claire's stepmother. What was notable about the meal was its striking changes of pace - from the delicate herb broth and fragrant scallop dish in which you caught every nuance of the scallop meat to the fiery 'multi-flavoured chicken' and hot and sour noodles - a real switchback ride for the palate.

The standout matches included two rieslings - the 2010 R3 Riesling trocken from Stefan Breuer and slightly sweeter 2010 Riesling spätlese, Gut Hermannsberg which were paired with three dishes - sweet and sour spicy cucumber with stewed ox tongue (which had apparently been braised for a day and a half in 18 different spices), some fragrant pork dumplings with Chinese chives and the spicy multi-flavour chicken. The drier R3 worked best with the intensely aromatic tongue - a wonderful dish - while the spätlese coped better with the heat of the chicken. I think the fact that both were recent vintages helped.

Interestingly they switched back to a drier white with the scallops - a 2009 R & A Pfalll Grüner Veltliner Hundsleiten - which had a refreshing herbal edge that perfectly suited the delicate, cooling dish.

The big surprise of the evening however was an intensely aromatic 2011 Zohar Torrontes from Susanna Balbo in Argentina’s Salta region which was an outstanding wine pairing with a tricky to match dish of cold ‘hot and sour' noodles with Szechuan pepper and chilli oil which somehow enhanced its own floral character. But it didn’t work with the next dish of Mapo Dofu (a very spicy tofu recipe also known unflatteringly as ‘old pock-marked woman’), rice and Szechuan pickles.

Nor on the other hand did a very pretty raspberryish 2010 Framingham Pinot Noir though it possibly might have done if it had been chilled for longer. It was the only match that didn’t come off through the whole evening though a Bruno Sorg Crémant d’Alsace struggled a bit with a very peppery dish of spiced potato. Sichuan pepper is particularly hard to handle as it’s not only hot but leaves your mouth tingling.

The final intriguing pairing was a semi-sparkling gamay called Boisson Rouge from Domaine Montrieux, a natural wine that hit it off surprisingly well with the dessert - a sticky rice ball with nuts and sugar - and also provided a palate-cleansing finish to the meal.

All credit, I must say, to Lily and the guys at Flinty Red for an incredible meal and some inspired matches - and for proving how well Szechuan food can lend itself to a tasting menu. It would have been hard to find one wine to go throughout the meal though if I’d have been forced to chose I would probably have gone for the spätlese riesling.

Note: Sweet wine obviously has an affinity with the fiery heat of some Szechuan dishes as you can read from Margaret Rand’s write-up of an earlier dinner with Tokaji here.

You may also enjoy: 

• Pairing wines with Chinese cuisine
• Wine pairings for a Chinese stir-fry
• Beer pairings for Chinese food

Photo by Engin Akyurt

 

How to host a wine pairing dinner

Ollie Couillaud’s inaugural wine dinner at The Lawn Bistro in Wimbledon, west London yesterday was a masterclass in how to get it right.

First of all he only had four courses. Too many wine dinners these days have multiple small courses, challenging for the kitchen and sommelier, wearying and unsatisfying for the customer (particularly male customers, it has to be said) who want a ‘proper’ meal - and are entitled to have one for the money they’re paying.

Two wines (all burgundies) were served with every course - except the aperitif and the dessert. That gave the presenter, Master Sommelier Gearoid Devaney of Flint Wines something interesting to talk about and the attendees a chance to learn more about this complex and confusing region. They were also from different producers and vintages.

The menu was well chosen. That should go without saying but sometimes the chef’s ego gets in the way of showcasing the wines to best effect.

We kicked off with some clever ‘amuses’ including the most wicked, silky-textured chicken liver parfait I’ve ever eaten which were served with a glass of 2009 Domaine Ballot Millot Bourgogne Blanc from vineyards which border Meursault, showing how impressive basic burgundy can be in the hands of a good producer.

Next a sound choice of seared scallops and black pudding with Granny Smith apple purée and lentil and hazelnut vinaigrette - a great foil for two lovely white burgundies, a 2009 St Aubin 1er Cru Charmois from Domaine Paul Pillot and a 2010 Chassagne-Montrachet from Domaine Moreau. The Moreau was still incredibly young but opened up beautifully in the glass.

The main course of roast squab pigeon with foie gras, Jerusalem artichoke purée, fondant potato and port and orange sauce looked challenging on paper but worked amazingly well with both the 2005 Aloxe-Corton Domaine Lebreuil and 2008 Beaune 1er Cru Les Sizies Domaine Guiton that were served with it, the lighter, more elegant Beaune, surprisingly, having the edge over the richer, earthier Aloxe-Corton.

And the dessert was served simply on its own - a croustade of caramelised apples with vanilla ice cream with a show-stopping crisp pastry cone which covered it like a witch’s hat as it was brought to the table. No accompanying wine as burgundy doesn’t do sweet wines. We didn’t miss it.

The numbers were kept low (25) to give the kitchen a chance to adjust to serving banqueting style rather than the normal restaurant service and the price was a fair £95 for the quality and amount of food and drink that was served.

The guests went away asking when the next dinner would take place. Couillaud clearly has a ready-made fan base for future events.

I attended the dinner as a guest of The Lawn Bistro.

Photo by fauxels