Ordering the Cheapest Wine on the Menu

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With the turndown in the global economy, there have been news reports that people are both eating out less and cutting back on some items when they do eat out, for instance bottled water, expensive wine and dishes with supplemental charges. But long before that, I was dealing with cheapo wines. Disclosure: I have perhaps only 1% Scots blood in my veins, my French-Anglo people having fought those whiskey-drinking brutes to the North for years from their lairs in Northumberland after fleeing Normandy with Billy the C. in 1066, but genes are powerful – ergo, I’m cheap. But notwithstanding that, as I’ve said here and elsewhere before, much of the belief system about wines is hooey, bullshit, puffery and the language replete with fancy Harvard 25 cent words. Evidence: – As a callow yout’, I got my red wine out of the Citarella barrel on 165th St and we all loved it. – Shortly thereafter, my first wine god-guide, one Peter H, who had trained with Alex Lichine at Mecca, aka the Médoc, came to visit us in San Antonio, (where I started writing this a while back, ironically), while I was preparing to fight off the yellow-skinned Commies from leaping from Viet Nam to Hawaii and then to the Haight-Ashbury. was a fabled starred resto in 1966 and Peter was the wine consultant to many places in Texas at the time that were seeking to match oil wealth to national reputation. With some trepidation I passed him the wine list and asked him to make the selection. While I was making about $10,000 as a Captain in Uncle Sam’s Army and could lose my life in a few weeks, I was not about to spend big bucks. But, he took one look at it and ordered the cheapest bottle. I gasped audibly. Oh, he said: “Rule 1, places bump up the prices on their top of the line Chateau Haut BS but never on their lowest cellar holdings. Rule 2, it’s all marketing and an AOC designation that was done in last century anyway. And Rule 3: None of these owners or patrons know what they’re doing anyway.” Huh. – Then, through Peter I met Gerald, recently recruited from the UK to import wine to the US and his stories were terribly funny, awfully accurate-sounding and horribly chilling. Such as the one about the rich East Side matron entering Sherry-Lehman just before the holidays, wanting to buy and serve the most expensive wine they sold (a Spätlese or Auslese, or other lese) regardless of its compatibility with the food she was serving (caviar, salmon, oysters and the like.) – Trips Colette and I made to France, but more so to Italy, convinced me that cheap did not necessarily mean bad. On an early trip to Paris, for instance, I discovered that the locals were getting their wine from kegs in the back unlike the tourist chumps like me who bought bottles in the front. And, in Italy at a fabulous place called the Maison de Filippo in Courmayeur, they just asked “red or white?” – When I spent my first full uninterrupted year in France, while I was buying regular 750 ml bottles of wine at Nicolas (yes, I was naive), my buddies living in Aix-en-Provence and Geneva were pouring wine from 3 and 5 liter boxes stored out their kitchen windows in back. – Somewhere along here (in 1976 to be exact), Steven Spurrier, the UK-FR wine guy, not the quarterback, did his famous Judgment of Paris, where the non-French wines outclassed the Froggie ones, and suddenly all bets were off. – We all play our little pranks, at least if we once wrote for America’s oldest humor rag, and having learned that the son of my favorite eating companions poured inexpensive wine into expensive bottles, eliciting “ooohs and aaahs” from the imbibers, I repeated the same silly, juvenile trick just a few months ago with the same results. That pricy “etiquette” will sucker ‘em every time. -At the a bit ago, I was struck by the prices of the wines and searched for what my pal Atar calls “Waldo”, as in “Where’s …..?” that is, the cheapest one, usually found deep down in the “Divers” section. When the sommelier approached, I said sheepishly that “I think I’ve found it, the ‘most interesting wine’ on the list” (having learned from Atar that this was the code word for cheap). He looked at me with a mixture of pride and contempt and said – “You’ve found it, Sir, there is not one wine here I would not drink right now, I choose them because they are good.” – To stay with friends for a moment, my buddy Atar and I have a convention when eating at Parisian places – turning with great sagacity to the other to ask whether to order Talatar (Talbott-Atar) the cheapest bottle, or Atartal (Atar-Talbott), the 2nd cheapest. – Two years ago, I was forced to eat out in the US for about 7 nights at named restaurants with a motley crew of rotating faculty members on a Search Committee and it never failed that one would ask about the wine that I had ordered (the cheapest, of course, at the request of my non-drinking Dean to stick to the austere budget) – “John, how did you know about this fabulous wine?” – Finally, the night before I started writing this essay, a really good egg former Dean and boss of mine who …
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