Who needs a laundry list? I want a wish list. Some aspirational wines. Some affordable. My disquisition on price, status, $200 bottles, and other aspects of a wine list.
Wine Lists: Wine List Prices
Most local restaurants offer prix fix specials during the off season. But they generally don’t offer any bargains on wine, and that comfortably frugal feeling of ordering the prix fix menu for $25 or $30 dissipates when you spend $50 or $60 for a bottle. Understand that I have no constitutional objection to $50 or $60 restaurant wines. It’s just that when I go out for a casual and inexpensive winter weeknight dinner, I want to keep it casual and inexpensive. Actually I want to keep it penny-pinching and cheap. How nice it would be if I could find a house wine for $25 or so on those evenings to go with the meal.
It’s my chronic off-season complaint. (I try to limit my whining to the small things in life and I pretty much ignore all those big things that we can’t do much about anyway.) But perhaps restaurateurs are listening, and I might have to give up bellyaching about their wine prices. I just found out that Fresno, on Fresno Place in East Hampton, is discounting its wine list by 30 per cent on Monday nights while offering an unrestricted fixed price dinner at $30. For example, the Mahoney 2005 Carneros pinot noir, an excellent California wine that is usually $46 on their list will be discounted to $32.20—an excellent price in a restaurant. Let’s hope it is the start of a trend.
It is often reported that restaurant customers are reluctant to order the low tariff wines on a list for fear of being perceived as tightwads. And maybe in this new Gilded Age no one wants to be taken for less than an over-the-top fat cat. Who can blame them in this time and place? You think to yourself that you’ve done pretty well in life, and then you look at the affluence around you and realize that by comparison you are nearly penurious. It’s humbling. And nothing but a $200 bottle of Opus One is going to make you feel, if not exactly better, that at least you’re swimming around in the serene waters near the top of the food chain.
I’ve always felt, and my wallet invariably agrees with me, that we should order the value wines on a restaurant list—if that is what appeals. That’s assuming you know something about the restaurant, by experience or reputation, and you trust the place. Any restaurant that is serious about its wines will work just as hard, maybe ever harder, on the bottom of the list. And they ought to be judged by that as much as by the impressive labels at the top. I sometimes wonder if those $800 and $1,000 bottles are there just to assure the rest of us that when we sit at one their tables we belong to the beau monde. I mean, outside of New York’s 21 Club and places like that, are the big ticket bottles part of the restaurant’s daily life? Are they really in the cellar, perfectly stored, and do people really order them? Props aside, a restaurant may mark up wines by 300 per cent or more, while 50 percent over wholesale cost is typical for a retail store. In a restaurant, you will generally pay at least twice the retail store price.
Just as you can find good wines from around the world at retail in the $10 to $20 range, a restaurant can offer gratifying wines, carefully edited, for $20 to $40. Of course their profit will not be as large as it is on a $150 wine, but they have to realize that many of us who often eat out do not customarily buy $150 wines. And we find it as rewarding to explore the budget wines as ordering the predictable and pricy ones. I leave it to the wine snobs to balance out my stinginess and enhance restaurant revenues. I shouldn’t worry. There are probably more prodigal spenders than there are curmudgeons like me, but the tide may be turning. “Reverse chic is a very powerful phenomenon in status-oriented circles,” said David Kamp, the author of “The United States of Arugula” in last Sunday’s New York Times.
