Mastering wine lists

How to win the restaurant value game

Uncorked by David Marglin

Usually this column concerns itself with retail wine shopping. But for many of us, our most difficult wine encounters take place in restaurants, where we're confronted by a list -- a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar -- and have to juggle priorities: value, taste, and not looking like a buffoon.

You can't have a ready-made guide for every list, so what you need is something more portable: a cogent strategy.

For most of us, the first consideration is money. You want to read a list and find good values -- what another columnist has called the "holes" on the wine list, bottles that'll get you the best wine bang for your dining buck. So how do you hit the holes? Since all wine lists are not created equal, and since each list is going to have something on it that will be the right wine given the circumstances, you need to understand the construction of wine lists.

The key piece of information you need is something most restaurants prefer not to talk about: how do they mark up their wines? A restaurant that's really into wine, such as Uva, in Brighton, will be up-front and add a fixed amount -- $10, in this case -- to the wholesale price of each wine. Wine lovers covet such restaurants, because you can score super values on wines whose prices have increased on the open market (and yet, astoundingly, have remained fixed on the list at these places).

Most restaurants, however, vary the markup from wine to wine. You'll find most of the serious markups at the high and low ends of the list. On the low end, plonk gets marked up because inferior wines are cash-flow drivers -- customers need a bottle of wine and they want what's cheap, so they don't really care what they're getting for $18 or $20. Markups on the low end can reach 200 percent -- say, $12 added to a bottle worth $6 in the store.

At the high end, there's a different problem: you have rarities that wine drinkers otherwise wouldn't be able to buy, and you're selling to rich people (or expense-account diners) who are more or less indifferent to cost. Twelve hundred dollars for a Chateau Lafite at Maison Robert? Pas de problème, mes amis.

Look toward the middle of the list, where markups are murkier but not as high; they'll probably fluctuate between 50 percent and 100 percent. On a good-value wine list, you can do better toward the bottom.

One other piece of advice: whenever possible, buy by the bottle. Buying wine by the glass may be the cheapest way to get a glass of wine, but it's also the worst value. I'm not saying that wine by the glass is inherently bad; it allows you to experiment and find out what you like. But bottles are almost always a better deal.

So let's see how these strategies play out in practice. Casablanca, in Harvard Square, recently revamped its wine list. The idea was to find some strong artisan wines (not necessarily well-known ones) that could stand up to spicy food. How to order here?

Well, for $18 a bottle (or $4.50 a glass), you can get a serviceable but uninspiring California merlot, a Washington State chardonnay-sauvignon blanc blend that is just decent, or a Romanian pinot gris. These wines are affordable by any standard, but none is particularly interesting. Step up to the mid-$20s and you can try a powerful '88 Montecillo Rioja, an earthy Provençal Bandol, or a tremendously fruity, grapefruity Sancerre from Blondeau. All are meaningful wine experiences that represent more than a $5 or $6 improvement over those $18 wines.

Cabernet sauvignon is the most popular red wine in America, but Casablanca has only two cabs on the list (softer Bordeaux-style wines don't really fit the food). Knowing that, you want to stay away from the cab and look for the spicy wine that will deliver flavor and complexity. The biggest values are right at $30: a knockout 1995 Edmund St. John Syrah from Napa and a stellar, award-winning Italian wine, G.D. Vajra's Dolcetto d'Alba, which is like a younger, fruitier Barolo with tremendous fruit and structure and some striking coffee, leather, and spice notes. Now you're drinking wine that's hard to find in stores and that stands up to anything on the menu -- a wine you will not soon forget. You will enjoy these glasses so much more than those you could have consumed for $18.

Of course, most of us don't walk into a restaurant knowing the retail prices of all the wines on the list. And not everyone knows the Dolcetto will be better than a cabernet. What then?

Your first resort should be the sommelier, or whoever handles the wine buying. A sommelier buys the wines, stores them, and helps pair them with food. (More serious wine drinkers often choose their wine first and then figure out what food will make the wine sing.) If the sommelier isn't handy, or doesn't exist, then maybe the wait staff knows a thing or two about the wines on the list. Just remember: you're paying for the privilege of eating at the restaurant, so you might as well get the full service you deserve. If you can find the person who picked the wines and ask him or her about that process, you will not only learn something but increase enormously your chances of finding the perfect bottle.

At Upstairs at the Pudding, more than half the list consists of American wines. That means you will find a lot of values in the American section. The list starts pretty high -- around $25 -- but if you talk to the sommelier you'll learn that customers weren't buying the cheapest wines, so the restaurant just dumped the bottom of the list. Among the reds, the low end now consists of midlist wines with real character: a sensational bottle of 1994 Chateau Souverain Zinfandel at $27, for example, and a 1994 Rioja Crianza from Conde de Valdemar for $26. On the white side, skip the 1995 Chateau St. Jean Chardonnay at $26 and leap into the $32 Edna Valley Chard from San Luis Obispo County, or try the 1996 Duckhorn Sauvignon Blanc (hard to find in stores) for $39, or the readily available but nonetheless killer '95 Viognier from Horton Vineyards -- made in Virginia! -- for $40 even.

In wine, you learn from experience. And if you don't have enough experience to order confidently, don't be embarrassed -- just borrow it from someone who does.

David Marglin can be reached at wine[a]phx.com.

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