Should Restaurant Wine Lists Comfort or Excite?

What do we want when we eat at a restaurant? Comfort foods and wine lists that we recognize? Or rather, do we eat out to experience foods we are loathe to tackle in our own kitchens and to experiment with wines we have never tasted?

I fall firmly into the second camp. I am a pretty decent cook and love dinners at home with friends and loved ones. So when I eat out, I will probably not order the pasta with fennel sausage and kale that I made last Tuesday.

And so it goes with the wine list. If all I see are the usual suspects (to be found on any supermarket shelf or airline coach section), I probably will not order any wine. If I really love the food, then I will bring BYOB, if the restaurant allows it. As I do at one neighborhood bistro in Atwater Village that I love to frequent but seems to have an aversion to changing up the wine list.

Granted, I am in the wine business, so perhaps it takes a bit more to pique my interest. But I believe that most intelligent, urban adults who seek out interesting restaurants, are also seeking interesting wines. NYC and San Francisco have been centers of interesting wine lists, with Los Angeles quickly and quietly catching up.
Restaurants are an opportunity to be adventurous, to step out of our norm. If not, why not stay home?

This was all brought to mind when I read the SF Chronicle review of Baker & Banker restaurant's wine list. I know the sommelier, Collin Casey, is a passionate wine lover who wants the wine list to be as exciting and transporting as the food.
But the reviewer seems almost irritated that he himself is out of the loop, that he does not recognize the wines the Casey has so carefully chosen for the restaurant list. He grumpily suggests that there should be some wines he knows.
I suggest he stay at home. All will be familiar to him there.

I had this conversation with another wine professional last night. She is friends with the reviewer and also suggested that wine lists should feature some well known brand names. But I responded that there are many chain and suburban restaurants that are perfect venues for branded wines. Why should a cutting edge, artisanal restaurant that is creating hand-crafted food, not have a wine list that is in sync?
I believe they should be featuring wines that are made by small producers and have not been over-processed.

Celebrating Natural Wine (and me) at Ten Bells

I was in New York last weekend to see some old friends and celebrate a birthday. Twenty years ago, I lived in New York and one of my dearest friends to this day met me then and celebrated this birthday with me as well. And so, to bring my old life into my new life, I invited a couple of old and new friends alike to meet at Ten Bells for a drink.

It was stormy and gloomy all weekend, with power outages outside the city. But we were a merry little group at Ten Bells last Sunday afternoon and into the evening. Above you see me with Pascaline, sommelier at Rouge Tomate, and Fifi, partner at Ten Bells.

Ten Bells is a joyful, unpretentious place with fresh, ice cold oysters and fresh, unprocessed wine. The Basque cider marinated ribs were delicious, the Texier was too big and dense for me, even with the ribs.
We enjoyed many wines that night, but it was a Vouvray petillant naturel from Dressner that sticks with me.

Virtual Wine Tastings; for Trade or Consumer?

I have been thinking about Brixr for awhile now. I was intrigued when I first saw the initial press release last year.
My first thought was that companies like Inertia Beverage Group or even Southern Wine & Spirits should be jumping on this opportunity.

Brixr takes a 750 ml bottle of wine and transforms it into about 14 tiny sample bottles, complete with miniature labels.
Because I work in the wine business, I immediately thought of the industry applications.

Ideas like virtual trade tastings with wine buyers across the country. Or even having distributor wine reps sent out with these tiny samples, instead of the 750 ml bottles.
Each buyer gets a fresh sample and gets to see the visuals of the regular wine label at the same time. Less wastage, more efficiency and greater reach.

A very savvy example of how to utilize virtual trade tastings has been displayed By Israeli Wine Direct. The owner, Richard Shaffer, has seen success with online and/or phone tastings with trade buyers that are thousands of miles away and have never met him. It's simple, he sends them samples and sets time to do a web conference or phonecall with the trade buyer. Afterwards, they place an order. Richard is now running a pilot program with a run of tiny sample bottles from Brixr.

Seems as if Brixr is more interested in reaching out to the consumer with this concept.
A wine lover can order a sample pack on the Brixr website. Either that is the end of the transaction, or even better perhaps that consumer then orders a full bottle or case of one of the wines they sampled.

But I wonder, will a wine consumer really adopt the above buying behavior? Trade buyers are disciplined about sampling product and then making a buying commitment.

Will the sample packs in themselves be of interest to the average wine lover? Maybe.
But will they be enough to get them to return to Brixr's website and order full bottles or cases of said wine? I am not so sure of that. It would represent a significant shift in the buying experience for wine consumers.