The Restaurant Wine Menu Challenge

Hints for an upscale restaurant with a voluminous wine list:

The wine "catalogue" is brought to your table and your first thought is, "Is there a Cliff's Notes version of this encyclopedia of fruit of the vine? You pass trying to figure it all out by choosing a $10 glass of wine you "think" you may have heard of.

Trying to keep this brief but meaningful here are some rules of thumb:

1. decide--if you can--whether you might want, red, white, rosé or sparkling.

2.  If you have a preference for a particular country, look for such a highlight. 

                                    --You're narrowing the mysteries down--

3.  *In a list of wines, the better "value" wines tend to be listed in the middle!

                        --Better value means the markup is less than on other wines.--

4.  I have found that most "nicer" restaurants that have a "designated wine person" are excited to make a recommendation for you base on what you tell them. Be honest about your wine IQ, tell them your price range (speaking of by the bottle here) and I have always been impressed how well they do! 

Hints for a routine, limited wine list in a "normal" restaurant:  

Look at the price of your wine by the bottle versus by the glass (if offered).  Wine by the glass is PRICEY! A bottle (750ml) of wine yields 5- 4 ounce pours        or 4-5 ounce pours. So if you are planning to have two glasses of wine each for you and your company, do the math!  A $32 bottle of wine, is cheaper than buying 4 glasses of the same wine for $9 a glass.

Another rule of thumb is that a bottle of wine that costs double what you could buy the wine for in a store is a pretty decent value! Restaurants make big money off their alcohol sales sometimes pushing their markup to 150% over retail.  

Needless to say, I rarely buy wine when I go out to eat. I can't stand being gouged, paying for 1 glass of wine for what I KNOW I could buy the whole bottle for from my local supermarket!