Drink - Victoria Moore prefers the house wine
Published 09 September 2002
The best way to choose wine in restaurants is to be ruthlessly selfish
Ordering wine in restaurants is a minefield. Friends always shove the list in my direction, presuming (often incorrectly) that I'll make a better choice and (correctly) that I won't be able to contain my disdain if I disapprove of their selection.
In fact, I'm usually the one to disappoint because it's my policy always to order the house wine unless it looks particularly vile. Most restaurants mark up wine by around 200 per cent, a little less at the very expensive end of the wine list. House wine is often slightly better value because restaurateurs know that decency of house wine is a measure by which customers rate them. So for, say, £13 I should get a decent £5 bottle of house wine. For a £7 bottle, I might have to up my spending to £21. I prefer to save the £8 and ratchet up the quality of wine I drink at home.
There are ways round the mark-up: Andrew Jefford recently wrote that if you call in advance, many restaurants will tolerate you bringing your own wine in return for a fat corkage fee (often £10, which you can easily save). This, of course, means choosing what you drink before you have looked at the menu - akin to seasoning your food before tasting it. But then, even the clumsiest attempt at food and wine matching is impossible when you have four different main courses and four starters on the table. My advice is to be ruthlessly selfish. Pick something that goes well with your food and assure your less knowledgeable friends that you have chosen the best fit.
I most resent the expenditure haemorrhage when the list clangs with the sort of wines I'd usually pay not to drink and when its lower reaches are suffocated with New World wines whose prices I could recite to the nearest 5p because I've seen them so often on the shelves at Thresher and Oddbins.
Clever sommeliers build lists so temptingly esoteric, such monuments to hand-picked quality, that they transcend the humdrum notion of a list and I would gladly stand on the pavement hurling £5 notes into the breeze for the opportunity to sip them with my dinner. Club Gascon, where the waiter whispers vinous profundities into your trembling ear, is one such place.
Indeed, the waiter's power in guiding you towards the emotional wine decision should not be underestimated. At Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street Restaurant, those in charge of the cellar were surprised to find they were zipping through the stocks of Sardinian wine, not the natural choice of most diners. It soon emerged this was because a lone Sardinian waiter was proudly and fervently recommending wines from his homeland, seducing the customers before the wine had even reached their lips. That's what wine's about.
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