Ordering wine at restaurants: don’t let guests get too greedy

How to cope when someone you’re entertaining at a restaurant orders a terribly pricey tipple.

A 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti would set you back $89,510 at Rockpool Bar and Grill in Sydney.

A high-priced restaurant experience, complete with a wine hijacking, wasn’t a topic I expected to discuss during a routine dental check-up and cleaning last month. But that’s exactly what my dentist, David Silverstrom, wanted to talk about when I sat down in his chair.

Silverstrom and a colleague had recently invited a third dentist to dinner, and it quickly turned into a pretty pricey affair.

Their guest, a self-declared wine expert, ordered three bottles of Napa cabernet for a total of more than $US1000 ($1300) — and let them pick up the bill. Had I ever heard of such a thing, Silverstrom wanted to know.

I most certainly had.

A few weeks earlier, some friends told a similar tale. The couple, who prefer to remain nameless, had been invited to spend the weekend with friends who own a beach house, and on the last night, as a thank you, they took their hosts to dinner.

At the restaurant, the hosts’ 20-something son ordered some very expensive wine, turning my friends’ little sojourn into anything but a “free” weekend at the beach.

Although most wine drinkers comport themselves with a certain degree of decorum, shameless business associates or greedy “friends” holding their hosts fiscal hostage by ordering a pricey Burgundy or Bordeaux is nothing new.

I’ve never experienced it myself — my being a wine journalist probably keeps people from trying to pull such tricks — but I’ve often been on the receiving end of other less costly but no less disgraceful examples of bad wine etiquette.

Take, for instance, the person who brings a particular bottle to a party or orders a special wine at dinner, only to repeatedly fill up their glass without pouring it for, or offering it to, anyone else.

Witnessing such antics, I sometimes find myself having to almost wrest the bottle away from the sticky-fingered offender. This sort of behaviour is the opposite of a gracious host or true wine lover, who always serves others first. Wine is for sharing, not hoarding, after all.

A slightly more passive version of the example above is the act of maximising the amount of wine in one’s glass. When the waiter approaches the table to refill the wine glasses, a certain sort of drinker will immediately down the contents of his glass, thereby ensuring that they will get the largest share of the wine.

My friend Paul Sullivan, author of The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy, admits he has done a bit of speedy wine swallowing himself. But he insists that he only does so when a guest orders an expensive wine on his tab, as a way of getting a little something back.

Paul has an even more effective bait-and-switch strategy for dealing with piggish guests: if they pick an absurdly expensive wine from the restaurant wine list, Paul says something like, “That’s a fascinating choice, but I don’t know if it will go with what we’re having” and promptly summons the sommelier.

After telling the sommelier the name of the wine his guests have chosen, he points to a more moderately priced selection on the list, making sure his guests can’t see what he’s doing, and asks if there is “something over here that’s more interesting”.

A good sommelier always catches on, Paul says, and “suggests” the new wine in his preferred price point.

Another friend, a high-powered ad executive based in New York who wants to remain anonymous, also enlists the sommelier’s help when dealing with indulgent oenophile clients who want to capitalise on her expense account.

“I’ll call the sommelier ahead of time, choose the wine for the evening and say, ‘Can you have these wines ready to go?’ ” she says.

This friend, who “wines and dines clients constantly” as part of her job, says she has been a victim of greedy wine types about 10 times in her career. “Clients know agencies pay and that agencies want to impress,” she says.

Interestingly, it has never happened to her while dining with someone who actually knew something about wine, she says. “I’ve never had a client who had a sophisticated palate take advantage of a business dinner.”

The Wall Street Journal