From The Globe and Mail: "Wine by the glass? I'll pass"

BEPPI CROSARIOL

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

July 30, 2008 at 9:18 AM EDT

There are people who wisely eschew certain menu items when forced to dine in questionable restaurants. Sushi and steak tartare, for example.

Me, I avoid wines by the glass.

Once uncorked, a bottle of wine boards the bullet train to vinegarville. Basically, it is as perishable as a piece of raw fish or meat, freshness-wise, if not as dangerous. But you wouldn’t know it by how some restaurants and bars treat their wine, especially in summer, when elevated room temperatures can accelerate the chemical reactions that precipitate its decline.

Curiously, even a restaurant or bar that would not dream of serving day-old buns or rancid bar nuts will generally be happy to sell you stale wine – at a premium to the cost of fresher juice sold by the bottle.

The risk to unsuspecting drinkers is especially acute early in the evening, when half-empty bottles from the previous day’s service are circulated for a second go-round, just like Saturday’s unsold salmon repurposed as Monday’s fish cakes (and shrewdly accompanied by a strong tartar sauce to mask any odours).

Who, after all, is going to complain?

It is fair to say your average chardonnay sipper isn’t completely equipped, or temperamentally predisposed, to assess whether a bland wine was in fact bottled that way or owes its mediocrity to negligent handling. Most restaurant critics would be clueless, too.

By now many wine aficionados know red wine is generally served too warm. Standard summer room temperature of about 24 degrees amplifies astringent tannins and exacerbates volatile alcohol, causing some wines to taste overly bitter and medicinal. At least when you order a full bottle, as opposed to a glass, you can ask for an ice bucket.

But heat per se is not the only problem. Higher temperatures promote chemical reactions, including wine’s dreaded foe, oxidation.

When exposed to oxygen, wine’s fragile flavours distort in all sorts of ways. Lively whites will inevitably become flat. After a few days, they may develop “maderized” flavours, the salty-tang quality curiously considered a virtue when intentionally induced in fortified wines such as Madeira and sherry.

More insidious, wines will lose aromatic intensity. A grassy New Zealand sauvignon blanc may simply become less grassy. Unless you’re familiar with the brand, you may conclude the wine was never particularly flavourful. (Hey, if you’d wanted a white wine with no flavour, you’d have ordered a pinot grigio.)

Many tannic reds such as expensive Bordeaux can actually benefit from oxygen in the short term (say, a couple of hours). This can coax out certain aromatic qualities and fruit flavours. But most easy-drinking reds sold by the glass get nasty quickly once opened, developing a flat, prune-like character.

So much for the caveats. Even as the heat of July underscores the by-the-glass booby trap, things this summer appear to be looking up. A growing number of exacting restaurants are turning to fancy new technology to combat the oxidation problem.

One such establishment is Reds Bistro & Wine Bar in Toronto’s financial district. Already known for one of the largest by-the-glass selections in the country (typically between 70 and 80), Reds several weeks ago added eight more superpremium selections, all dispensed by a machine called an Enomatic wine serving system. Or, as its Canadian distributor in Montreal, Stéphane Fournier, calls it, an “electronic wine bar.”

Invented in Italy in 2002 by two Tuscan entrepreneurs, it is designed to guard against the slightest degree of spoilage. The system works by automatically filling the airspace above the fluid in the bottle with a blanket of inert gas (argon or nitrogen, depending on local availability). Enomatic boasts it will keep wines like new for more than three weeks.

Installed in about 5,000 locations around the world, including almost 100 in Canada, the system works with a prepaid electronic debit card that the customer typically buys at the cashier, inserting it into the machine and selecting one-, two- or five-ounce pours. Because of killjoy Ontario restrictions against self-service, at Reds the card is duly guarded by the bartender, who does the swiping for you.

“It’s really exciting and it’s a great conversation piece,” Taylor Thompson, the sommelier at Reds, told me over a fresh pour of Etude pinot noir from California. The system was not entirely new to me; I had put an Enomatic through its paces last year at the wine superstore Lavinia in Paris. Fun isn’t the word; it was like a slot machine for hedonists, with a constant payout of little sips of wine that you might never risk buying by the bottle.

The Reds system is on loan from Foster’s Wine Estates Canada, which saw an opportunity to promote its luxury wines to people afraid to take a chance on a full bottle. The Enomatic wines on offer at Reds include the rare Penfolds Grange Shiraz 2000 ($100 for a five-ounce glass), Beringer Howell Mountain Merlot 2000 ($65 a glass) and Château St. Jean Cinq Cépages 2001 ($75 a glass).

Mr. Thompson says more than a few patrons have opted for one-ounce pours (at $23 in the case of Grange) as a way to test drive wines they had been considering by the bottle. “People also can try wines that they may be aging in their own cellar,” he said.

Ontario restrictions notwithstanding, Enomatic systems, ranging from $4,000 for a bare-bones four-bottle unit to $18,000 for a dual-temperature eight-bottle model, have been set up in select stores in most provinces from Newfoundland to British Columbia, including eight in Quebec. There is no danger of customers getting blotto, Mr. Fournier says. “It’s all software driven. We can lock a card by the amount of millilitres it serves a person per hour. It’s even a better lock than a barman.”

The system, encased in handsome stainless steel and glass, is also finding its way into private homes. Mr. Fournier says several collectors in Canada have bought Enomatics as a new way to enjoy expensive wines gathering dust in their cellars. One customer in Montreal installed an eight-bottle system in his living room.

“It’s always a question of, ‘When am I going to open that special bottle?’ ” he said. “With this machine, now you have a month to discover it.”

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Tips for ordering by the glass

Beware of tiny restaurants with a huge by-the-glass list. “If the dining room does 60 covers a night, then 40 wines by the glass probably doesn’t work,” says Ingo Grady, director of wine education at Mission Hill Family Estate winery in British Columbia.

If you are among the first to arrive at a restaurant in the evening, ask the server if he or she minds opening a fresh bottle rather than pouring the previous night’s dregs. Be nice when you do this.

Don’t be afraid to ask the barkeep or waiter for a tiny sip. Some restaurateurs resent this, but wines by the glass usually cost a premium, so you’ve already paid for the extra sip.

Much as you love to show off your knowledge of underappreciated grapes, try to stick with popular varieties, such as chardonnay or merlot. Odds are that bottle of Austrian zweigelt on the counter was uncorked during the Reagan era and has been oxidizing ever since.

White wine is often a better bet than red. Cold fridge temperatures slow down the oxidation process.

When it comes to red wines, stick with full-bodied tannic styles such as cabernet sauvignon and syrah. Lighter-bodied varieties such as pinot noir are superfragile and decline more rapidly with exposure to air.

Beware of by-the-glass bubbly. A half-empty bottle will become unpalatably flat within a day. Beppi Crosariol