Wine Conversations: Wine in Restaurants… And Beyond! (II)
Service in any venue is about genuine curiosity and connection - not just wine
Welcome to another round of Wine Conversations, where a group of Substack wine writers take on a topic in the field and attempt to, if not argue, at least reveal different perspectives on a question. This month’s question comes from Maria Banson: "What are the demands of modern wine drinkers, and how should service professionals meet them?"
Maria is a working sommelier, and her question centers on wine service in a restaurant or wine bar, where she emphasizes the significance of listening, providing a good glass of wine at a timely speed, and connecting the technical language of wine to the more casual vocabulary of the average wine drinker.
While I work in a form of wine service, in a tasting room, I’m not a floor sommelier, or perhaps any kind of sommelier, depending who you ask. If we want to have a substantial disagreement in one of our Wine Conversations, maybe we should discuss the definition of a “sommelier!” But that is a topic for another month. I was a server and bartender in restaurants and bars for years and did serve some wine, but I’m quite distant from that chapter of my life. More recently, my view on restaurants and wine bars has been from the customer’s seat, so I’m going to address the question first from a patron’s perspective, drawing especially on my experiences before I started formally studying or working in wine. Then I’ll follow that up with a few thoughts from my current position as a wine educator who hears a lot of people talk about their points of confusion and what they want when they’re drinking wine out in public.
Let’s just start with a baseline of what wine drinkers want. I think it’s safe to say that we want good wine, and we are counting on our wine professionals to understand what that is (in general and to us specifically) and provide it to us. But if that was all there was to it, restaurants would just need to curate a great wine list and let their customers have at it. Great wine service is a bit more extensive and ephemeral than that.
Going back to the days when I was just a reasonably well-informed wine drinker, my worst experiences with wine service were from professionals who either assumed I knew nothing, or assumed I fully understood the incredibly specialized vocabulary of the wine industry (or that I should understand, served with a side of snobbery). You may notice the common element there: they assumed. Too many sommeliers and other service professionals failed to engage in the seemingly basic listening skills that Maria so strongly advocated. When I was at the very beginning of my wine journey and knew what I now realize was hardly anything, I probably could have used a gentle nudge now and then out of my misplaced confidence in certain producers and pairings. As I learned more, I was often looking for an expansion of my palate - an adventure in taste and smell! But I met with a lot of mediocre glasses of Cabernet, and whether it was because they underestimated my willingness to experiment or just didn’t know better themselves, I will never know.
On the other side of the spectrum were the wine professionals who took just a moment (and sometimes many moments) to ascertain what I really wanted from them, sometimes even when I wasn’t exactly sure what I was asking. At the beginning what I wanted was for them to just give me the thing I ordered because I knew what it was. You don’t need a sommelier for that. Later I was looking to discover, and that’s when good wine service really mattered.
I think in particular of a wine bar I frequented when I first began studying wine formally - that fun stage when it sounds like you might know things but, at least in my case, just meant that I was about to be disabused of the idea that I knew much at all. They didn’t condescend to me when I mispronounced terms or revealed that I was completely unaware of the existence of Beaujolais or Barolo. They were patient and thoughtful when I came in time and again and just said, “Give me the most interesting thing you’re pouring.” Eventually they offered to serve the glasses blind, and urged me to talk about what I was experiencing.
I also remember with incredible clarity a couple of excellent restaurant somms who took my invitation seriously to take full creative license with my pairings. My sommelier at Daniel in New York seemed utterly delighted to bring out some of their more unusual wines, and took the time to thoroughly explain what they were and why she thought they would work, despite the fact that she was in the middle of a busy dinner service. I will forever be grateful to her for the aged Sylvaner she introduced me to, but even more so for the time and respectful attention she gave. She never assumed for a moment that I knew or didn’t know anything; she was just excited to connect with someone else who loved wine and wanted to receive the best of what she had to give.
That connection is at the heart of what I believe most wine drinkers want from their sommeliers and other service professionals. Connection doesn’t always require that much time or energy, but it does require intention and the willingness to pause and hear another person, and sometimes ask questions to draw them out. I always think the best service professionals (and the best people, to be honest) are deeply curious. Good wine service requires curiosity about the wine, of course, but it becomes great wine service when combined with curiosity about the guest as well. When you approach another person with curiosity, you haven’t made a prejudgment about what they need or want; you’ve invited them to share their needs and wants with you.
Although my work is not in a restaurant setting, I find curiosity and connection serve me - and hopefully my guests! - equally well in a winery tasting room, where I am usually providing educationally-oriented tastings. The experiences that fall flat are those in which I don’t direct my attention toward genuinely getting to know them. Sometimes I feel pressure to get out All The Facts about the winery and wine, and in my workplace there are many. Occasionally time is pressed or my energy levels are low, or I’ve made the mistake of evaluating my guests before I truly engage with them, and I fall back on giving them knowledge rather than connecting the knowledge to who they are and what they really want. No matter how solid the knowledge may be, no matter how great the wine is, those tastings are lacking that extra something that makes for a truly excellent hospitality experience. Curiosity and the desire for genuine connection make all the difference in whether those ninety minutes are a pleasant but ultimately forgettable opportunity to taste five specific wines, or a launching pad to greater enjoyment and broader exploration of wine as a whole. The latter are the kind of experiences I hope wine service professionals are striving to give to our guests, regardless of the venue in which we work.
Next up in the conversation is
, so stay tuned later this week for his perspective on the wine service question!A small tangent related to this topic: what I personally would like is more wine bars that function like actual bars, i.e., they stay open late and are places of open socializing where people can meet strangers and friends alike and build community. Wine bars here in this very wine-oriented area inexplicably close at 7pm, perhaps 8pm if they are very generous. Do their patrons not work? They don’t need to stay open until 2am, but I’m so confused as to why wine bars so often act as though wine drinkers go to bed after the early bird special.
Great stuff, Stacey. I think I know what I'm going to riff on from this post for my own upcoming entry!
Re: Wine Bars closing early, I suspect it's the particulr liquor license they're going for and the rules surrounding it. Here in Los Angeles, you have to be a full retsaurant or bar to serve past 10pm. So the tasting room where I work closes at 9pm (so we have that hour of grace period rather than just kicking people out.) That service time limit came with our liquor license. And so most wine bars in LA have these hours - 9pm close most days, usually earlier on Sundays. Likely, whatever the closing time in whatever area, those hours are being demanded with whichever license they're trying to hold. And if they wanted to be more of a night time operation, they would have to go through all the neighborhood hearings, etc. to make that happen.
I actually think the demand is there, but it's not something alcohol businesses can just do in America. It would probably take united effort from most tasting roo.s pushing local government to make the change. And if there's one thing wineries and wine bars largely suck at, it's united efforts.