How to Drink at Work
In a separate post, I wrote before about buying your wines aged and ready to drink rather than heading to your local retailer and buying some “fresh” stuff. There are several online retailers that specialize in these older gems which have a great selection of ready-to-drink age-worthy wines for you to grab today and enjoy at your next special dinner.
We can thank the Romans for bringing the art of growing grapes and making wine to all of the areas they conquered over the centuries. But the homeland of the empire, Italy, has been making delicious wines for thousands of years. That means they know what they are doing.
Unfortunately, many of the great Italian wines are from native grapes and species we have never heard of. Many people are familiar with Barolo and Barbaresco from the Piedmont area, as well as the elegant Chiantis from Tuscany, but this barely scratches the surface of the wines available from Italy.
Every restaurant tries to strike a balance between offering an impressive and encyclopedic wine list with one that its customers can pick a selection from with relative ease.
But the kinds of restaurants we typically wine-and-dine clients at usually fall at the phone book-sized end of the spectrum, where they offer hundreds of wines in every variety to choose in pairing with your food.
While it would be tempting to spend an hour or two perusing such a list, the pressure is on to choose something fast; you can tell your guests are thirsty and their parched eyes are boring into you waiting for your decision.
What do you do? Continue reading “Why You Need to Trust Your Sommelier”
There’s a famous line from the movie “The Jerk” where Steve Martin finishes a bottle of 1966 Chateau Latour Bordeaux the waiter asks if he would like another. Martin says no, he’d like to splurge and get some fresh stuff – “no older than this year.”
We all have a few favorite restaurants that deliver amazing service, great food and … an uninspiring wine list. Fortunately, there is an alternative to forcing yourself to drink something you don’t want: it’s an ideal time to bring that special bottle of wine, or two, from your cellar along with you. But how do you do it? Continue reading “How to Bring a Bottle of Wine to a Restaurant”