Jay Rayner asks for greater simplicity

The Guardian critic, Jay Rayner, has clarified his recent comments on restaurant wine lists, saying he simply wishes they were more approachable to those on a budget.

During a dinner at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this October while promoting his new book, Rayner, was heard to proclaim that too many wine lists were “intimidating” and “fraught with problems, mostly because of the bollocks spouted by wine connoisseurs.”

“I do not hold to being intimidated by anything in life and if a wine list irritates you just buy the cheapest on the list and tell them all to piss off,” he concluded.

The comments first appeared in the Telegraph, then the Daily Mail and indeed on the drinks business’ own site. Rayner was swiftly in touch, to explain his remarks.

Although he said it was “clearly not what I think” absolutely, he was of the opinion that, “a lot of wine lists don’t help themselves.”

His main gripe, he told db, is that too many are “written with a particular customer in mind,” principally one that is wine literate and happy to leaf through a multi-page wine list organised by country, variety or style.

Often touted as a more interesting, informative or simply ‘quirky’ way to list wine, usually by those in the trade, Rayner is clearly not as convinced it’s a great help and thinks also that it ignores the guiding principal of most people when they look at a list – how much the wine costs.

“It pains the people who write wine lists to order them by price,” he said. “If you’re on a budget you have to work hard to find a wine in your price range. All you see are baffling wines and it alienates people.”

He recalled the time he challenged the sommelier at Petrus to create a list of 20 wines for under £20 (this was some years ago). The result, he said, was “startling”.

“What it did was make it welcoming to a younger clientele perhaps on a weaker budget and it makes me mad they don’t do it [more, now],” he said.

Costs were also a bugbear and he thought that with the likes of Vinoteca and Corkage in Bath offering sensibly priced wines, especially by the glass, “people are very much more sensitive to stupid markups. I’ve seen mark ups of four or five and that’s shameless. Two or three is understandable but four or five is outrageous.”

He also stressed the importance of sommeliers who were “genuinely interested in communicating their knowledge and enthusiasm,” largely because, he went on, “the number of people in this job for their own self-aggrandisement is maddening. They sometimes go off on a big speech when you don’t necessarily want it. The restaurant business is about people. You need the emotional intelligence to know when to go on a spiel and when to shut the fuck up and sell the wine.”

As he concluded, he is well aware how expensive the running of a restaurant is nor is he anti the practice of restaurants putting their margin on a bottle of wine but his initial frustration and his ultimate plea was for more clarity and simplicity for the consumer on a budget.

“If someone like me who’s very assertive and pretty well educated finds the experience grinding, what’s it like for everyone else?” he asked. “In the end it’s the wine business that suffers for it.”