“Cody, honey, you want your sandwich now, or a cookie? Or how about walking up the aisle again? It’s time to stop screaming now, Cody, OK?” The frazzled mom in the row behind me pleads with her toddler, offering choice after choice. Cody, exhausted to a state of mania after hours of transatlantic flight, would clearly benefit from having his choices limited to, “Either you go to sleep this minute or the other passengers will kill you.”
I know how Cody feels. I get the same way when confronted by a giant wine list. Although I seldom scream and throw food, still, as it thumps down in front of me, my heart sinks along with the table. Thirty pages of wines I can’t pronounce, fathom or afford, and that’s just the Italian section. If I find this daunting, what’s it like for people in other fields?
Studies show that even for us post-toddlers, more choices do not equal greater happiness. We’re drowning in alternatives as it is. IPod Shuffle or Nano? Or MP3? Fixed rate or ARM? Premium or regular or silver? I want to leave that all behind when I go out to eat.
Decisions take time. While I flounder around in Piedmont Reds, my guests are dying of thirst. (Why don’t more restaurants suggest an aperitif, say, a glass of Prosecco, when we sit down? We’d relax sooner, they’d sell more wine.)
I could order the Dolcetto, but…oh dear…supposing the Aglianico was better? The more alternatives, the more we second-guess. We accept a choice of twelve entrees; why do we need to scroll through eight Barolos and fifteen Chiantis? And since I seem to have written myself into an Italian restaurant, what’s with the Bordeaux and Napa sections? We’re prepared to forgo fries and frog’s legs for the evening, so why not drink Italian, too? One of the lovely things about wine country, be it Sicily or Ohio, is you get local food with local wine and you like it.
But a multicultural list can be manageable, if it’s not bloated. An interesting selection from up-and-coming regions, well-matched to the food, helps you discover new wines. Especially if the staff has actually tasted it and can help you choose. If not, then by-the-glass specials and pairing suggestions on the menu can help.
What drives the doorstop-list phenomenon? Awards, mostly. Restaurants want them. I understand; they give credibility—I chase them myself. (Just look to the left.) But to be award-worthy, a list needs expensive older vintages and “important” regions, as well as staggering variety. If the wine authorities call that impressive, we believe them, just as I believe the guy at Jiffy Lube when he comes out cradling what looks like a liver transplant and tells me I need a new one.
Of course there are people, the sort who don’t truck with common nouns -- “So I tossed the Gaultier and Manolos into the Vuitton, and threw it in the Porsche…”-- who are only happy with cultish labels and exorbitant prices, wines they’d probably never choose blind. But even the staunchest tuft-hunter can’t make use of more than a page or two of the trophy list.
Many restaurants find the A-list impractical to maintain; a lot of capitol tied up in a perishable substance. High staff turnover can leave few servers familiar with any wine other than what today’s visiting distributor got them jazzed up about. In some cases, as soon as the award is on the wall, the restaurant quits stocking what they think no one’s going to order.
And even when the staff has a clue, restaurants tell me precious few people even ask about the list, opting for safe, familiar stand-by wines. As the manager of an upscale restaurant noted, most people just want to get drunk. I can relate to that, after five solid hours of Cody’s screams in my ear and sneakers thumping my back. “Come on up here, sweetheart. Aunt Jenny's got a nice Grappa and Halcyon milkshake. No, you don’t have a choice…”
Copyright 2007
