wine service nightmares

There is an amusing, painful tangent developing within this thread:

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=11896

about experiences with either poor wine service on the restaurants' end, or bad assumptions on the diners'. Should you wish to share in this catharsis, please feel free to post those memories of unexpected (or unreceived) bottles.

While nobody ever seems to unintentionally order a $100 pork chop, the road to a good wine buzz appears to be littered with shock-inducing receipts. In vino veritas.

I am an admitted anything goes wine drinker. I like Yellow Tail and I like the higher end bottles. Anyway, here goes my story:

Two years ago, my boyfriend and I were dining at now defunct restaurant in Wrigleyville. We ordered the house California red. I can't remember the exact price but I do know that it was around $25. We were poor and getting a bottle at that price range was a splurge.

The waiter comes out, pours two glasses, and sets the bottle down. We never got a chance to check the label, do the taste thing, etc that normally happens when you order a bottle. So after the waiter leaves, we look at the label and realize that we have been served a bottle of....

2 Buck Chuck.

We laughed and never went back to that place again.

Serving 2 Buck Chuck is probably why they are no longer around. Illinois is a three tier state and Charlie is only sold at Trader Joes. That means they had to go and purchase it at TJ's and then resell it which is illegal at least in this state.

By latest wine service pet peeve is the habit of the server to come to the table and pour wine in my glass every time they come to the table. I don't need my wine "topped off" like it was a cup of coffee.

And don't get me started on the "heavy pourers". 1/3 full, please.

DMChicago wrote:By latest wine service pet peeve is the habit of the server to come to the table and pour wine in my glass every time they come to the table. I don't need my wine "topped off" like it was a cup of coffee.

And don't get me started on the "heavy pourers". 1/3 full, please.

I cannot stand aggressive servers who constantly refill wine glasses, especially when I'm drinking a good/pricey bottle. Very annoying to have it refilled every time I take a drink and to the brim so I spill half of it all over myself or the table and am not allowed to swirl it around the glass as I'm want to do. A huge pet pieve(sp?) of mine.

I like to pour my own wine at a restaurant and to pour my GF's wine as well. I know I'll get some disagreement from fellow LTHers who deem it part of the necessary service at certain destinations but that's not for me.

If the server has to pour it then it should be poured when my glass is empty. DO NOT EVER TOP MY GLASS OF WINE OFF...EVER. I loathe this approach. Part of the enjoyment for me is refilling my empty glass, or even having it refilled by the server when it's EMPTY.

Bster

This does not really have to do with WINE service, and I know the pouring issue has been dealt with before, and I have probably related the same story in a previous thread, but I think it bears repeating (well maybe not).

Recently many restaurants have jumped on the gastro-pub bandwagon, and now offer premium artisinal Belgian ales and micro-brews in addition to wine. I think that is great, and I love to experiment with food/beer pairings. The problem is that very few servers have been taught proper beer pouring skills. Even more than with sparkling wines, the method of pouring a beer is an essential part of the service. Moreover, the proper pouring technique varies with beer styles.

More often than not, I find when I order a $12 bottle of beer in a restaurant, the server just slops it into the glass, with total disregard to technique. Sometimes this causes a huge frothy head to form, or causes the beer to go prematurely flat. I much rather have a waiter leave the pouring up to me than trash an expensive brew. Even then, I have had problems. On more than one occasion, after carefully and gently pouring a bottle conditioned ale into my glass to avoid stirring up any residual yeast from the bottom of the bottle, I have had a server come up without asking and dump the leftover sludge into my carefully poured glass, then whisk away the empty bottle.

Here is a link to a pretty good primer on properly pouring beers.

http://www.howtodothings.com/food-and-d ... -beer.html

This isn't a nightmare, but is worth retelling:

My family and I were at a nice restaurant on Saturday night and ordered a fairly expensive bottle of wine. The wine was really boring and I was disappointed that we were spending so much on this bottle of very pedestrian wine.

This disappointment was eating at me and I began to read the bottle. I noticed that the bottle was the 2010 vintage.* The wine list had the 2007 vintage. I did a quick search on my phone and realized that the 2010 was selling at retail for about half of what the 2007 sold for. I pointed this out to the waiter. He immediately offered to replace it (though he noted "vintages change," kind of missing the point that "vintages matter"). We switched to a much less expensive bottle of something else that was excellent.

Yesterday I pulled up the restaurant's wine list on-line. It had been updated that day. The 2007 vintage had been replaced with the 2010 vintage and was listed for about half of the price.

*Yes, I was shown the bottle before it was opened and, no, I did not verify the vintage before the bottle was poured. So shoot me. The vintage happened to be listed on the back of the bottle, so I didn't see it when the bottle was shown to me and I didn't think to ask him to turn it over.

d4v3 wrote:Recently many restaurants have jumped on the gastro-pub bandwagon, and now offer premium artisinal Belgian ales and micro-brews in addition to wine. I think that is great, and I love to experiment with food/beer pairings. The problem is that very few servers have been taught proper beer pouring skills. Even more than with sparkling wines, the method of pouring a beer is an essential part of the service. Moreover, the proper pouring technique varies with beer styles.

Read this & thought to myself, "I've been really impressed by how knowledgeable gastro-pub servers are about describing & pouring bottled beer..." and then saw the comment was made back in 2007 (which now seems like the Stone Age of the gastropub trend). I'm glad that--on this issue--things have changed for the better in the last 5 years!

Interesting thread. I wish I would have known it was here.

Not so much a nightmare, but a real pet peeve of mine when it comes to wine service is when I order a wine that's say $80 or $90 a bottle and am presented with a $1.99 piece of stemware. The kitchen doesn't send out food on paper plates, why is wine serviceware so poor?

I mean, I'm not asking for some $100 Reidel stem, just don't insult me with a garbage glass.

JLenart wrote:Interesting thread. I wish I would have known it was here.

Not so much a nightmare, but a real pet peeve of mine when it comes to wine service is when I order a wine that's say $80 or $90 a bottle and am presented with a $1.99 piece of stemware. The kitchen doesn't send out food on paper plates, why is wine serviceware so poor?

I mean, I'm not asking for some $100 Reidel stem, just don't insult me with a garbage glass.

My related pet peeve is restaurants that serve decent wine in tumblers. I realize that in Italy it isn't that uncommon to serve wine in tumblers. They also add water to wine. But, this doesn't make it right. If Italians jumped off a bridge, that doesn't mean my neighborhood Trattoria in Chicago should do the same. More importantly, Italians tend to drink really simple wine out of tumblers. So when my neighborhood Trattoria wants me to drink a $35 bottle out of a tumbler, I'm not happy.

Darren72 wrote:
My related pet peeve is restaurants that serve decent wine in tumblers. I realize that in Italy it isn't that uncommon to serve wine in tumblers. They also add water to wine. But, this doesn't make it right. If Italians jumped off a bridge, that doesn't mean my neighborhood Trattoria in Chicago should do the same. More importantly, Italians tend to drink really simple wine out of tumblers. So when my neighborhood Trattoria wants me to drink a $35 bottle out of a tumbler, I'm not happy.

When I was in Italy (more than once) I was never served wine in anything other than a glass with stem. Even in the little side-of-the-road place where they pulled the wine out of big white plastic barrels, and we ate pizza watching futbol on the TV in the corner.

leek wrote:

Darren72 wrote:
My related pet peeve is restaurants that serve decent wine in tumblers. I realize that in Italy it isn't that uncommon to serve wine in tumblers. They also add water to wine. But, this doesn't make it right. If Italians jumped off a bridge, that doesn't mean my neighborhood Trattoria in Chicago should do the same. More importantly, Italians tend to drink really simple wine out of tumblers. So when my neighborhood Trattoria wants me to drink a $35 bottle out of a tumbler, I'm not happy.

When I was in Italy (more than once) I was never served wine in anything other than a glass with stem. Even in the little side-of-the-road place where they pulled the wine out of big white plastic barrels, and we ate pizza watching futbol on the TV in the corner.

That's great, and even more reason to eradicate them from American restaurants, but the tumblers are indeed still around in Italy. You were lucky to have missed them.