Solid advice about daunting wine lists
I can’t even remember where I picked this up, but it’s 100% good advice: when choosing from a restaurant’s wine list, it’s OK to choose the least-expensive bottle. If the sommelier liked the wine enough to buy it and list it, it’s gonna be at least OK. No restaurant wants you to remember it having awful wines in its cellar.
Julie and I spent the weekend in Ashland, visiting the restuarants where we’ll dine with the alumni for the Shakespeare Festival. At Il Giardino, I was perusing the Italian reds, and chose a Dolcetto d’Alba. Now I knew very little about Dolcetto d’Alba, other than that it’s from northwestern Italy and the name means “sweet”, so I thought it might be OK (based on my knowledge of wines from Verona). It was the least-expensive wine in the section, but I trusted to the word of wisdom about price.
On first pour, the bottle was just an average red wine. But within 30 minutes of opening, Julie pointed out that it was getting sweeter - and I hadn’t told her what “dolcetto” means, so her perception was honest, without prompting. We finished the bottle and made a note of it for future. Now we have a new wine we can rely on, and it just happened to be the least-expensive bottle on the wine list. Woo-hoo.
