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.

March Madness

My husband’s family was in town this weekend and that inevitably means that I am in charge of what the whole gang drinks with dinner. It took me years to earn the job but I suppose they couldn’t fight it anymore when I chose wine as not only my hobby but my career.

Although sometimes being in the wine business means that picking out wine for a varying degree of palates on your weekend can feel like work, I cheerfully accept the responsibility. After all, if you can have control over one thing when the in-laws are in town it might as well be alcoholic intake.

If you have ever been the “go-to person” when it comes to navigating a wine list for a crowd of people you are acutely aware of the many road blocks, from dinner orders and personal likes and dislikes to how much to order and exactly how much to spend per bottle. That is precisely why I make every effort to get the wine list in my hands well prior to dinner.

Generally speaking this is not a difficult feat. Many restaurants now post their wine lists online (although you should be wary of out of date lists) and others are more than happy to fax or e-mail the list to you. That is why I was shocked to find out that March, a highly regarded restaurant in Manhattan, refused to send me the list ahead of time because it is “too extensive” and it is their “policy”.

Policy shmolicy. What harm could possibly come from sending your wine list out to a discerning customer who is going to spend lots of money at your restaurant later that evening (I mentioned that I was dining there with a party of 11)? Does it come down to possessiveness or just plain laziness? I will only say that in this case the wine list was approximately 12 pages. Pretty extensive, huh?

Stop the Insantity

As reported by Vino Girl , earlier this week. A nice bottle of '76 La Mission Haut Brion hit our offices in the sweltering heat. Now I can hear you saying, "Oh, winemonkey clearly this must have been an error on the retailer's part that would not happen again." Alas, such is not the case as anecdotal evidence has indicated that our unnamed supplier has offended yet again.

But this post is not meant to be an indictment of this retailer. No, this post is an indictment of the entire wine industry. Producers to wholesalers to retailers ignoring that wine should not be shipped unrefrigerated. So I ask you, how is it that a $2 gallon of milk is shipped so easily in refrigerated trucks yet $100 wine goes into the hot box?

Now don't get me wrong, there have been many producers that refuse to ship in the oppressive heat that much of the country has been experiencing, but a quick scan of the major bulletin boards and you can see the complaints of those that received yet another shipment of wine club wine in the dead of summer. And don't even get me started on the wholesalers and distributors.

No one is saying you shouldn't make a buck. That is hardly the case. If a customer wants to take the risk, let them. But when a customer specifically says not to ship something into the heat or worse doesn't even know its coming (e.g. wine clubs) perhaps cash flow should take a back door to prudence.

Or else you may find your customers are taking the back door to you.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot!

New York City is in the midst of a persistent heat wave with "real feel" temperatures reaching the mid to high 100s. Retailers around the city and its environs are relentlessly advertising specials on the perfect "heat wave wines" when even an avid wine lover such as myself knows it's friggin' beer weather! Better yet, water weather! Any cold beverage you have would serve you better simply poured over your sweating brow. But I digress.

Yesterday, on what I can safely say was the hottest day of the year, a bottle of wine was delivered to me from a local retailer. Yes, you read that right. Yesterday. The hottest day of the year. Wine delivered in an un-refrigerated truck. And to make matters worse the wine was a Chateau La Mission Haut Brion from 1976. A fragile wine. Even if it was a young 2003 Cabernet from California it would have been unacceptable but at least young kids can take the heat. Any retailer in their right mind would not have shipped any wine over the past few days.

I won't belabor the point. The wine went directly into the Eurocave as soon as it was rescued from the doorman. I can only hope that it will be the same charming wine I tasted two months ago at an auction pre-sale. The wine was not highly lauded by critics — quite the opposite in fact. But to me it had great intensity of flavor and is worthy of drinking again. The bottle will most certainly be uncorked soon. I hope to report that it survived the heat unscathed.

Stay tuned — and stay cool.