Some like it hot?

So, I have to say the your good ol' winemonkey was quite the hipster this weekend taking in a New York style late night dinner at The Stanton Social. Our 11:30pm resy wasn't even the coolest as the dining room was full to the gills until after 1am and even got a 2am bump with late night partygoers looking to chow down.

The company was excellent and the food fun with tapas sized items that included kobe beef sliders and french onion soup dumplings along with a handful of fried items whose batter was a bit heavy. This post, however, is not a knock on chef's heavy handed breading.

It would be obvious to anyone reading a wineblog that we ordered up some vino and this, my friends, is where everything went wrong. After sallying forth into a interesting and eclectic winelist typical of many of these hotspots, we awaited for our ill fated selection to arrive.

The waiter, in standard fashion, showed me the bottle and poured a taste. As I am want to do in the presence of non-wine entusiasts such as my dining companion, I tone down the ritual rhetoric to a quick sniff for corkage or fault and wave the waiter on. My first instinct was that the wine was a bit alacoholic, but it was not of too much concern as we picked a random Aussie to try and I figured the heat was a finction of an over-ripe americanized style. As I began to take my taste (and as the waiter began to pour the wine out) it became obvious to me that this wine must have been sitting under the heat lamp with our kobe beef sliders. I could have sowrn I was drinking mulled wine it was so hot. I stopped our waiter and asked him to chill the bottle, but should have immediately sent the thing back. I am sure he looked at me with surprise as it was a big red wine, but I was basically paralyzed due to the shock of the situation.

Now I have tasted thousands of bottles of wine and while I am quite good at noticing cork taint I will have to say that this is the first time I have been poured hot wine. Now, I am not talking cooked wine, that no doubt many of you have experienced, but hot wine. Could this be the new trend in wine service? Are the hipsters mocking the wine faithful and saying "Forget 68 degrees we drink red at 86! Bring me a cup and a saucer!"

Thankfully, my company more than made up for the wine (which ended up being plonk), but I have to admit that I will now fufill the wine tasting ritual from nose to palate to avoid another overheated bottle.

Or perhaps I am just not as hip as I thought.

Cheers.