The Official Wine Thread - Page 995

Great suggestions- both new to me.  I have tried a least 200 new wines this year- they are just endless here.  The trick is finding the bottles that are not available in the US...otherwise I'm wasting the effort of shipping them over!  These look like good candidates- Thank you for your recommendation.  

You can get Malvira here but it's not common. Be sure to try their single vineyard bottling like Mombletramo. They're heralded in Italy for their Arneis.

I really don't, but its personal taste. I like to keep the dinner focused on the people at the table. A good server is someone you never notice, IMO. I'll occasionally have a chat but it's rare. Same goes for chatting people up at the next table.

Reminds me, about 2 months ago I was out at dinner and the waiter forced me to perform the tasting. I asked him to just pour and he said said not until I tasted it. I was a bit surprised but I did it, though I still wonder why he insisted.

So they don't waste a bottle by pouring it out across the table and it turns out you don't like it.

My thoughts as well- if you should refuse the bottle due to preference, they would lose profit on their by the glass sales.

This may be true for the servers, but in my experience, most people at a finer restaurant want to talk to the sommelier. It's part of the experience.

Sure, at a the neighborhood Italian joint, this may not be the case, but if you are at Per Se, most people ordering wine are going to want to have a nice chat with the sommelier. It's part of the experience, and you can learn a fair amount. Some of my best restaurant memories are talking with the sommelier, choosing wine(s) for the meal, and then seeing how those wines, many of which I would never have selected on my own, work with the various parts of the meal.

Only once did a customer ever send a bottle back because they didnt like it. I waited/sommed thousands of tables back then.

And frankly, if a host at a table I was sitting at sent a bottle back because the poor delicate little flower didn't like the wine enough I would be pretty embarrassed. Just drink it fast and move on to something else.

Can you just shut the fuck up?

My experience is that ballers just ask you to pick or to present a couple of suggestions on what's primed. If I want a suggestion I point to a price on the list and ask for something primed in that range.

I understand wanting to learn something, but I just don't want to listen to a waiter blather on about wine when you know they're going to shove you out the door soon for another seating. Again, people have different expectations of a dinner and this is just me.

Also, I prefer a dinner party setting for the sort of food experience you are describing. The American restaurant experience always seems hurried nowadays. Its rarely a comfortable setting to polish off 5 or 6 bottles among a group of 4 unless you pick a slow night.

I've never had a bottle that was "lightly" corked or anything, it has always been blatantly obvious. I've noticed that some people pick up on it, and others don't.

I often wonder how many people don't notice.

This.

I also think people confuse TCA with Brett.

i think a lot of people don't quote understand what the symptoms are. Some might give a blanket judgment of "this wine seems off, hmm" while others may pass it off as "the winemaker must have used a lot of tasted oak, or something like that". In a college class, I had the distinct pleasure of smelling TCA in a wine (that is, the chemical was added directly to a wine so we'd get a sense of it), and I belive this was helpful in helping me notice it in some of the wines I've had. The next year, my wife had the same "TCA in a wine" experience.

In the end, I think it's helpful to have a corked version of a wine next to an un-corked version as this will help one get a sense of what changed in the wine.

Your wife was added directly to a wine so you could get a sense of her?