Top 12 restaurant wine gripes

In a restaurant setting, the path to vinous pleasure should be simple: sit down, order, sup, enjoy. In reality, many restaurants seem intent on frustrating us. Gibberish-filled wine descriptions, dodgy glassware, wines that are sweatily warm or flavourlessly cold, waiting staff who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about – that path is beset with obstacles.

But then, maybe that’s unfair on the trade. It’s true that the more customers know about wine, the more difficult they tend to be to please. And the less the customers know, the more difficult their wishes are to decipher. Perhaps the sommelier’s task is an impossible one – one customer’s attentive service is another’s endless fussing; a professed hatred of Sauvignon Blanc is promptly followed by an order of a glass of Sancerre – what is one to do?

Into this minefield of wine propriety we now tiptoe. We’ve sourced responses from our followers on Facebook and Twitter, as well as colleagues working in the trade (some of whom almost literally leapt at the chance of being able to vent their spleen), to bring you a selection of the biggest gripes associated with drinking wine in a restaurant.

If you have one that isn’t included, feel free to vent your spleen in the Comments section.

Wines too hot or too cold

A complaint that came up again and again in our research. Wine temperature is a much misunderstood and much neglected subject – that counts on both the customer and the restaurant side. One respondent foamed with frustration at the common experience of ordering a white wine that should be served chilled and finding it’s been kept at ambient temperature, then shoved unceremoniously into an ice bucket, “so it’s pretty much undrinkable for the next 20 minutes”.

Similarly annoying, one fortified wine lover said, was an apparent inability of some restaurant to serve Port at the right temperature. Those restaurants should take note: warm Port does not a happy Port-drinker make.

That’s only the start of it though. Champagne that hasn’t been chilled properly was declared an outrage; ditto a fine white that’s served ice cold, robbing it entirely of aromatics; same goes for reds crudely served at ambient temperature (an even bigger crime during summer months) when they really need to be several degrees cooler.

It’s the sommelier’s job be prepared and ensure that these little nuances are observed. If they fall short, you should take you custom elsewhere.

Clueless staff and disappointing recommendations

It’s a well understood, if lamentable, fact that more bullshit is spouted in the wine trade than in any other profession bar politics. When you are in the care of an expert who knows his wine list and producers like the back of his hand, who is sensitive and experienced enough to be able to identify what you’re looking for and provide it, the world is a happy, sunshiney place. When your server knows nothing about the wine, or offers a recommendation that bears little or no resemblance to what you have requested or what they bring to the table, the consequent sense of dismay can be acute.

As one commenter for this feature noted, restaurant staff should know as much about the wine as they do about the food, though this is frequently not the case. With high staff turnover a constant problem in the restaurant trade, there’s always a risk that you’ll be stuck with a waiter who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or, worse still, doesn’t know what he’s talking about but pretends he does. In such a scenario, politely ask for the head sommelier to help; or if it’s the head sommelier who you’re already talking to, politely ask for your coat.     

Dodgy glassware

To order a good wine and then have it served in an inappropriately shaped glass – such as the hopeless little bistro-type glasses pictured right – is akin owning a musical masterpiece and playing it through a smartphone speaker. It’s also an insult to the winemaker. The whole point of the bowl section of a wine glass (apart from containing the liquid, of course) is to capture the aroma, which is absolutely central to the enjoyment of the wine.

A generous bowl and a considerably less than full glass will allow you to swirl the wine and release its, hopefully, delicious and mercurial aromas prior to drinking it. It needn’t be complicated, and faddishness is not to be encouraged (one respondent had very little time for those ‘unspillable’ stemless numbers that roll around the table). Of course, some glassware companies take the idea of glass specificity to extremes, and much of that is nonsense, but there is some logic to having different glasses for different types of wine – Zalto’s range have become de rigueur in London’s top restaurants – there certainly seems to be a correlation between restaurants using them and very good wine experiences. What you don’t want to see when you sit down dine at a restaurant is any sort of wine glass that fails to take into account the effect the bowl has on the enjoyment of the wine.

Asking for your drink order before you’ve decided what to eat

A far more common occurrence than you might think. It’s all fine, good and reassuring for our wine waiter to ask whether you’d like a nice apéritif to settle you in – we like that – however to otherwise presume to take a drink order before we’ve even begun to contemplate the gastronomic options in front of us is hardly welcome.  

Lack of diversity/same old rubbish

You’re presented with the wine list and scan the references only for each one to provoke a little stab of disappointment, a tumbleweed rolling across a desert of uninspired wine options. As one complainant complained: “There’s always a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc on a wine list or an Italian Pinot Grigio – think of other wines! There are so many other wines that can challenge the restaurant-goer, and as long as you put an accurate description and relate them to something that they know and understand, people will go for it!”

Restaurants must of course walk that fine line between keeping the uninitiated customers content and filling their lists with vinous exotica, but any venue worth its salt should be provoking a “What’s going on here then?’ sort of response. Venues such as these.

iPads 

Technology can be our best friend (the wheel, the lightbulb), or our most maddening, malevolent foe (supermarket self-checkouts). Sometimes we don’t know what to make of it yet. iPads look good, and are less cumbersome than the traditional leatherbound wine list tome, but as one wine griper observed, their “achingly cool” credentials disappear when they haven’t been updated.

Obscene mark-ups

Along with wine temperature probably the most common complaint of all from the customer side. Some in the trade are quick to point out the high costs of running a restaurant and the necessity of trying to claw something back from wine sales, feeling that this complaint is a bit of a cheap shot. But there is a growing clamour, even from the most respected critics and journalists, about the prices we in the UK are expected to pay for the privilege of enjoying a nice glass in a restaurant.

I suppose we should be thankful we’re not drinking in Paris. 

Unannounced vintage variation

A subtle but keenly felt sense of grievance was felt by a small number of respondents who, upon placing a satisfactory wine order, were presented with a bottle from a different vintage from that advertised. This has to be seen as a pretty large faux pas on the part of the restaurant. Even if it relates to the cheapest, most basic wine on the list the sommelier or waiter has a duty to let the customer know.

Wine is an agricultural product whose quality varies from year to year by virtue differences in weather during the growing season. One numerical digit could mean the difference between a good evening with money well spent and a bad one filled with bitterness and resentment – restaurants take note.

Inadequate/gibberish wine descriptions

Most people think that Chablis is a grape rather than a wine region. Without some sort of description to guide them, there is almost no point in giving them a wine list in the first place. Then again, over-elaborate or gibberish wine descriptions get us nowhere either. One annoyed respondent averred: “For every wine description there are only three or four words that have any value – style (dry, med-dry, etc), body (full, medium, light), aroma/ flavour (fruity, herbaceous, mineral, etc.). Perhaps adding a bit about the winery, that’s all it needs. Anything else is just padding.”

Admittedly, this one is up for debate. And I quite enjoy a wine description that gives its taste guide as ‘trouser jazz’. 

Wine being removed from the table

In their agonised, OCD pursuit of perfection, some smart restaurants will insist on keeping your precious wine bottle off the dining table – this can be alarming for the uninitiated and not a little annoying to suddenly feel denied of your freedom to pour for yourself or your fellow diners.

One respondent related how at one exclusive Knightsbridge restaurant, they didn’t allow any bottles to be kept on the table – neither wine nor water. When asked to have the bottles left on the table so the diners could help themselves, the waiter said he’d have to ask the manager, then hid the drinks on a side table out of sight.

If the service is anything less than perfect, this is bound to cause a curious sense of impotence that one could do without.

Pushy staff

A complaint that was raised again and again was of unfinished glasses being removed from the table, with one complainant noting that this was especially prevalent in US. This wine gripe works both ways, however – many’s the time that a waiter will quite sensibly attempt to remove a glass that has been sitting with its dregs for an hour only for the diner to yank it back with a look of goggle-eyed affront.

Another common cause of irritation was the experience of “waiters frantically refilling your glass after every sip in the hope you’ll order another bottle”. Cheeky, and a very common ruse.

Staff pouring the wine full stop is a bit fraught. Particularly, as one respondent said, “if your partner drinks much faster than you. It means, in my case, unless I down the drink at the beginning of the evening, I get almost no wine from a bottle. And, I don’t want to be preferentially topped up, because I don’t like drinking from a full glass”.

With all this to contend with, who’d be a sommelier?