Liquid Assets – What Makes A Good Wine List?
Editors note: With this article, Madison Dining Online continues the series by guest columnist Greg Fowlkes. Greg will be contributing an ongoing series of articles covering wine, beer, and other topics, while applying a local Madison slant to the topics. Here’s the second article in a series on wine lists – what to look for, rating wine lists, and the best wine lists in Madison. See the previous article, Liquid Assets – The Five Rules of Wine Lists, here.
What Makes a Good Wine List?
Length does not automatically make a great wine list.
Depending on the restaurant, a wine list may be a simple sheet of paper or a bound, multi-page volume slightly smaller than War and Peace. There is nothing wrong with a short wine list. A list with a few wisely chosen wines is better than an encyclopedia of random selections of dubious quality. A short list may mean that the person responsible has tried to find wines that are both values and admirably suited to the food. Or they picked the first half dozen bottles their distributor tried to push on them. A lot will depend on the owner/manager/chef, but if they care enough to make good food, there’s a good chance they will have made at least some effort to put together a good wine list.
The wine selection should be appropriate for the food.
You shouldn’t expect the wine selections of a steakhouse and and Italian restaurant to be the same. The wine should compliment the food. Good restaurants will make an effort to select wines that work well with their dishes. It’s perfectly reasonable for an Italian restaurant to be weak on Australian Shiraz and concentrate on mostly Italian wine. This may mean that you have to skip the Pinot and have a Chianti when having a pizza, but if the restaurant is doing their job it’s probably for the best.
A wine list should be focused.
A wine list should be more than a random selection of whatever the distributor was pushing. Each wine on the list should be there for a reason. This may mean that there are many similar wines. This is actually a good sign because it means someone is paying attention. This doesn’t mean that diversity on the wine list is bad. One of my favorite lists includes Petit Syrah, Grenache-Syrah blends, Zinfadels, Cabernets, Cabernet-Zin blends, but they were all chosen because they worked well with the food. Of course another restaurant the specializes in steaks has another of my favorite lists that concentrates almost totally on Napa Cabernet and Merlot. One of my least favorite lists at a local steakhouse (which has since been changed) had a scatter shot selection of wines from all over the world, many of which seemed to have been picked more for their trendiness than for how well the went with the food.
The wine selection should be affordable.
Affordable is of course relative, but the price of the wines offered should be in line with the price of the food. If I were rich I might well choose to have a $100 bottle of Cabernet with and $8 hamburger. It might even be a good culinary match. But I’m not rich, and I’m guessing neither are you. I think a good rule of thumb should be that the average price of a bottle of wine should be about the price of two entrees. This doesn’t mean that every bottle of wine should be that price, but that should be the middle ground. I also think that it is unreasonable to expect the cheapest bottle to be much less than half that amount and offering a wine at much more than twice the price of dinner for two is just bragging on the part of the restaurant.
The wine prices should be reasonable.
The concensus is that pricing wines in a restaurant at about twice the retail price is fair. This allows the restaurant (who buy the wine at wholesale) to make a reasonable profit and cover the cost of storage, loss, breakage, carrying charges, glassware, etc. There are a lot of restaurants that keep pretty close to this or even beat it. Unfortunately, there are some restaurants that charge as much as 3 times or more the retail price. What can you do? Eat somewhere else. Or, if you really want to eat at one of these places, order the cheapest wine you consider drinkable, and save your wine bucks for establishments that have better prices.
How can you tell if the price is reasonable?
Very few of us can remember the prices of hundreds of different wines or carry one of those electronic wine guides along with them. What I’ve found is that remembering a few key wines that show up on a lot of lists around town usually is sufficient. If the price of these wines are acceptable, probably most of the wines on the list will be priced fairly. Wines that I’ve found useful for this purpose are Rosemont Shiraz and Ravenswood Zinfandel which are somewhere around $10 in a liquor store and Duckhorn Merlot which is about $40-45. The first two are mass produced wines and show up a lot at the low end of many wine lists because they are readily available and decent wines for the price. In a restaurant, a price of $20-25 would be fair. The Duckhorn can be found on the lists of many of the steak houses in the Madison area. The amazing thing is that I’ve found it priced anywhere from $55 to $130. A price of between $75 and $90 is probably reasonable. These wines work well for the restaurants I visit, but depending on where you eat you may need to pick different wines. Just find a few that are available at the restaurants you go to and that you can price at your local retail outlet. Note that these wineries also produce single vinyard wines that may be priced significantly more.
