Restaurant Wine Etiquette 101, or How to Dance with Your Somm, Part 2

We’ll take up right where we left off in Part 1. You’ve chosen a bottle, the somm or server has presented it for your approval and you nod yes because it’s the correct one. Your bottle is then opened and when it is, something happens that has flummoxed most diners since bottles have been opened at restaurant tables. You are presented with the freshly removed cork. What now?

What now, indeed. Do you smell it or give it an intense look over? It certainly seems like the somm handed it to you for a reason. She did, but she did this mostly out of an ingrained conditioned-response reaction.

The passing of the cork is a ritual that also dates back to the very beginning of table-side wine service. The theory behind it is for you to be able to tell if the cork that sealed the bottle did its job correctly and protected the wine from the vagaries of time and oxidation, both of which can adversely impact what’s in that bottle.

While it’s true that time does “improve” some wines by inducing gentle aging, the softening of rough tannins and the like, the vast majority of wines produced today, whether they are worthy of cult worship or come out of a box, are ready to drink upon release and will only “improve” marginally with the passage of time. Improve is offset by quotation marks because one person’s gentle aging is another’s over-the-hill pour, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Giving the cork a quick whiff, however, does at least make some sense because that sniff might pick up cork taint, which is essentially evidence of mold in the cork. Its smell is very distinctive and off putting. However, sometimes it may be so faint as to not be detectable.

I have had numerous bottles with pristine corks that turned out to be very corked. And I’ve seen just as many where the corks looked like something must have invaded them and the wines were just fine. In other words, any inspection of a cork, whether visually or olfactory, won’t necessarily provide assurances one way or the other.

This was perhaps an unnecessarily lengthy way of saying the presentation of the cork ritual is unnecessary, and to me, anyone who actually spends more than one second doing anything other than putting the cork on the table is losing time that they will never be able to get back. And anyone who spends, say, up to 10 seconds or more examining the cork just looks silly.

Of course, every bottle isn’t stopped by cork, real or synthetic (by the way, all of the digression into cork presentation doesn’t apply to synthetic corks because they can’t be affected by cork taint, so if you’re handed a fake cork, please just put it down on the table!).

The screw cap, once rare, is now ubiquitous, and in those early days, if you did happen to order a bottle closed with one, it was amusing to watch the somms work out what to do with them once unscrewed. There wasn’t any institutional knowledge concerning this variation of the dance pattern. Eventually, it seems that there was a general consensus that the cap just be pocketed by the somm.

On to the actual tasting of the wine. Generally, the somm will offer that little taste to whomever ordered the bottle. Often, the somm will ask if anyone else would like to participate.

What I often do when I’m seated with someone who is a wine person is ask the somm to give that person a taste, too. (Wine person is a category I lump in people in the business and civilians, as we call those not so employed, who I know to be really into wine; and that doesn’t necessarily mean they know a great deal, only that they really love wine.)

The point of this tasting is not to judge the wine’s bonafides in any way other than to determine if the wine is corked or otherwise off, which usually means either essentially dead (too old to have any redeeming qualities) or cooked (meaning it was exposed to excessive heat at some point) or oxidized (which can hasten premature death).

That is all. Somms and servers are generally very solicitous (they work for tips, after all) but I can assure you that they’re not eager to hear your review of the wine, whether it includes a laundry list of aromas and flavors or other poetic descriptions. The question they are asking without actually articulating it is, to pour or not to pour? “It’s fine [or something along those lines]” or “Can you taste? I think it might be off” or “Does it seem OK to you?” That’s all that need be said.

The somm will then nose and taste the wine. Regardless of whether they agree with you if you express doubt, 99 times out of 100, they will simply replace the bottle. Don’t feel bad because the distributor will always replace it no questions asked. The smell/taste test should take no more than three seconds. I’m serious. Don’t be that guy who swirls for five, sniffs for another five then swishes the wine around in his mouth for another five.

The exception to this three-second rule is if there may be a defect detected and that guy just isn’t sure. If that’s the case, immediately revert to the second and third response suggestions above. If this is what happens, and regardless of whether the wine is ultimately thought to be off or not, that guy is no longer being that guy and that’s good.

The only caveat to the above is if you order a bottle with lots of age on it for that particular producer or appellation. For example, if you order a Barolo with 30-plus years of bottle age on it, it’s buyer beware. Barolos are one of the wine world’s longest-lived reds but at some point, you have to know that you’re taking a chance, which is why I stay away from really old wines on lists even if I love the price, producer and believe that the restaurant’s buyer (often the somm) did everything that could be done to check the provenance of the bottle.

Most old wines are purchased on secondary markets and can often be bought and sold numerous time, so you never know who in the chain of custody was not responsible. If the bottle is dead, the restaurant might replace it or might not. The best practice is for the restaurant to very clearly state the policy in this regard.

The defects listed above that hopefully you won’t come across (or at least only a few times in your dine-out lifetime) are the ONLY valid reasons for rejecting an opened bottle. That you decided in retrospect that you’re really not that into excessively oaked Chardonnay (I’m with you, by the way) is on you, not the restaurant.

Your somm will often take the bottle back without being asked if your facial expression is sour enough, but it’s really not fair to the restaurant because that bottle isn’t going to merit a credit from the distributor. If word got out that Louie’s Italian American Restaurant (in the Bronx) was trying to get replacements for perfectly good bottles, that’s a relationship killer.

Let’s say there were no issues with the bottle. And now the somm pours (taster gets served last).

Rest assured that it took you way more time to read this post than it takes to complete this dance!