Do you suffer from wine list dyslexia? It’s the condition of looking at the drinks menu in a restaurant, but all the wines look indistinguishable (except for their prices). Common symptoms of wine list dyslexia include confusion, embarrassment, ordering crappy house wine by the glass, asking for the second cheapest bottle on the list, or simply drinking beer.
Does this sound familiar? Don’t worry – you are not alone. Everyone experiences this condition when confronted with a long list of unfamiliar bottles. I suffer from it even though I spend an inordinate amount of time reading and writing about wine. The problem is that it is difficult to make an informed choice about what will taste great and be a good value based on the scant amount of information contained on most wine lists. Confronted with the unknown, everything looks the same.
How to overcome wine list dyslexia? I often sidestep the problem by bringing my own wine to restaurants. This is a band-aid, not a cure. Many restaurants don’t allow BYOB. But more importantly, some restaurants have elegant wine lists that are assembled with method and intelligence (Domus, in Ottawa, springs to mind as one example). You may find wines in restaurants that you will never be able to buy in the LCBO, especially from small artisanal wineries.
My first suggestion to making sense of a wine list is simply to match the variety of grape to the food you will be eating. There are plenty of books and websites dedicated to food-wine pairings. Here are some basic tips:
- Chardonnay with cream sauce or rich fish dishes
- Sauvignon blanc with lighter fish dishes and salads
- Cabernet Sauvignon with red meat
- Shiraz or Zinfandel with BBQ and hamburgers
- Riesling and Pinot Grigio with spicy Asian dishes.
- Italian wines like Valpolicella and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo with pasta.
Other tips for successfully navigating the terra incognito of a wine list so that you get good value for your money:
- Avoid popular appellations, like Burgundy, Bordeaux, or California. These celebrated regions can produce excellent wine, but it will be over-priced in restaurants. The cheaper wine from these places that sometimes pops up on wine lists is usually a terrible wine riding on a good name.
- Gravitate toward less well known appellations. Overlooked regions can be excellent value, and they are a strong indication that the wine list has been assembled creatively. My favourites include: Austrian white wines; Portuguese reds; and Minervois, Costières de Nimes, and Cahors in France.
- Small local wineries are often your best bet for handcrafted wines with good value. (If you’ve never heard of it, it’s probably a small winery!)
- Look for older wines. It’s difficult to find inexpensive bottles older than 5 years on most wine lists – but when you do, it is another sign that the sommelier is creative. Age-worthy wines often mature to a quality that far outstrips their original price.
Try the desert wines. Sweet wines (except Ontario ice wine and Vintage port) are universally under-priced.
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