Sommelier Satisfaction

Readers sound off about sommeliers

James Laube
Posted: August 1, 2005

My Aug. 31 magazine column "Sommeliers: At Your Service?" triggered several responses. Readers wrote, called, praised and complained about service, my "dumping" on sommeliers in general and concerns about wine service.

Sommeliers should be your best friend when dining. They should steer you toward the kinds of wines you desire (based on what you describe) and be cautious about recommending wines that might be controversial, either in price or taste. Most importantly, it's best to let your sommelier know what you're thinking and whether you were satisfied with his advice.

First, the friendly thoughts:

"Thank you for a great column," Margaret from New York wrote in an e-mail. "I've been dying for someone to have the guts to do precisely this column, actually an even harsher one but you get the point across beautifully and, magically, with no venom, something I would not have been able to do, given some of my experiences.

"Thank you for saying, so well, what many of us felt needed saying."

Another two readers expressed their distress at sommelier service. Specifically, their beef had to do with decanting rare, special bottles.

In the old days (and I suspect it's still the preferred protocol) all wines were decanted at the table in front of the customer. But no more, so it seems.

A reader in Napa Valley explained how he brought an old Heitz Martha's Vineyard Cabernet to one of the valley's best dining spots, in St. Helena. To his astonishment, the sommelier took the bottle, left the room, opened it and decanted it before returning the filled decanter to the table along with the empty bottle.

I had a similar experience earlier this summer. A friend brought an old Vosne-Romanée to lunch one day in Yountville and decided it needed decanting. The sommelier whisked the bottle away to a service station (still in our view), pulled the cork and decanted the wine. Then he returned the wine in a decanter along with the bottle, which still had a pour left (with plenty of sediment).

Finally, he accidentally knocked the decanter off the table and, miracle of miracles, the heavy decanter flipped, spraying about a glass of majestic red Burgundy in the air and on the floor and it landed on its feet—without breaking.

Yet another reader complained about wait staff not knowing about the quality of the wines on their list. That's a familiar annoyance.

It's sad but true, but many restaurants that don't have sommeliers also don't provide adequate advice for the staff about which wines to recommend. Worse, I suppose, many waiters don't have the opportunity to taste most of the wines on their list, so they really don't have any opinion anyway.

Since I'm forever looking for something new and fun to drink, I always ask for advice or suggestions. But too often, if I select a wine and ask the waiter if it's any good, the standard reply seems to be, "Sure."

A couple of sommeliers took exception to what they considered a negative piece on their profession.

"It's hard enough breaking down the [image] barriers of sommeliers [as wine snoots]," said one sommelier, who called from work in Dallas. "I'm already in an old restaurant that's a bit of a gilded lily and we're trying to overcome the stuffy image of the sommelier with the tastevin.

"When I saw the title [of the article] I was hoping it could be a more positive spin with constructive criticism," he said, which was my intent. Then he added, "Not everyone reads the whole article. They just read the headline."

As for prices, he said few sommeliers have much control over pricing, especially in cities or states where it's hard enough to secure cutting-edge wines, much less put them on the list as values.

"I try to find the best values I can," he said. "At every table [that I serve wine at] I tell people if you don't like it, I'll drink it."

That's a healthy, positive attitude that almost guarantees customer satisfaction. The bottom line is many of us dine out regularly, most of us are passionate about wine, and we're not only paying the bill for great wines, we're paying attention to how we're being treated—good, bad or otherwise. That's healthy, too.