The central difficulty in maintaining the Short Cellar isn’t finding good bottles or waiting for them to mature; it’s drinking them fast enough. Bottles keep piling up in the Short Cellar, yet I can’t restrain myself when I enter a well-stocked Vintages. I don’t drink enough to be an alcoholic, but I buy enough to qualify as a shopaholic of alcohol.
This is because acquiring a special wine is as easy as pulling out a credit card, whereas drinking it demands a leisurely dinner at home with good company. This is a common problem: I know plenty of people with some wonderful wine tucked away that never gets opened because no occasion seems special enough.
Luckily, the Legislature of Ontario has provided us all with a solution: take your favourite wine with you the next time you go out for dinner on the town.
In January 2005, Queen’s Park amended ss. 8 and 86 of the regulations under the Liquor License Act to permit patrons to bring their own wine (BYO) when dining in a restaurant. Under the law, restaurants don’t have to allow BYO, and they are allowed to charge a fee (called corkage) for every outside bottle opened (usually between $10 to $50).
From a legal perspective, Bring Your Own wine arrived in Ontario three years ago, but it has yet to become a fixture in our dining culture. This may be because restaurants don’t like it, or simply because Ontarians aren’t used to it. In any case, it’s time to give BYO a shot, because it’s a fantastic way to burn through the best bottles in your cellar while eluding the dismal selection and huge mark-ups that make many wine lists such a compromise with mediocrity.
Some of my favourite BYO experiences include Fresh (894 Queen W., TO, $10 corkage) where the spicy, Asian-inspired vegetarian fare matches perfectly with a cheapish Riesling or Gewürztraminer from Ontario, or Cowbell (1564 Queen W., TO, $25 corkage), perhaps the meatiest place on the planet to consume a hearty Australian Shiraz.
If there’s one problem with BYO, it’s that most restaurants don’t advertise that they do it. This leaves it to the diner to ask about corkage when making reservations. Or, you can consult the excellent website Bring My Wine, with a growing (but incomplete) list of BYO-friendly restaurants and a ranking of those with the cheapest fees. I should also mention that even restaurants that don’t have an official BYO policy will sometimes permit you to bring in a select wine for a special occasion if you call ahead and explain. That’s what I do: I tell them that I have to open my 2000 Pauillac to celebrate a special occasion. Celebrate what, they ask? The opening of the Pauillac, naturally.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca.