(3 minute read)
There are many elements to the restaurant experience that can be memorable and worth cherishing, along with some others that can be dreadful and even stressful. Menus arrive in their various formats, some with minimal wording where it is hard to make out what you will be really getting, or some with orchestrated paragraphs of adornate descriptions that make it hard to choose.
The process of picking and selecting our drinks and dishes in a restaurant is a direct reflection of who we are in the world. If we go for safe and familiar, bold and unknown, or interesting and innovative, a little bit of each…how we behave with the selection process before us is very telling on how we face most things in life.
One encounter that I have found most amusing comes when faced with the wine list. Lets face it, most of us have no idea what we are reading. The regions of a country, the tasting notes, the comparisons, the metaphors, the poetry, it all sounds pretty and yet facing a booklet or list with a bunch of words and adjectives that have little or no meaning can honestly be the least cool part of the evening.
Funny enough, there is much encouragement to talk about the food, everyone can go on about the ingredients and the cooking, the flavors and textures, and do the same sometimes about drinks. Yet the wine list is presented like a daunting tome, filled with names that sound more like spells from a fantasy novel than beverages. Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, each with its own backstory and personality quirks. Words you can’t pronounce, staring back at you from the page, daring you to say them out loud.
Armed usually with nothing but what you have heard people say about wine, your wits and a vague recollection of a wine meme you saw last Thursday. You face the wine list with the heavy weight that you will choose what everyone will be drinking for the evening. Yikes. And you all have to support your decision are long adjectives and analogies to fruits, flowers, herbs and other natural elements (like wood, leather, earth, mineral, salt, rain…huh?).
It’s hard to explain even by those who know it well, where does that leave us, mere mortals, when having to choose a 30 dollar thing like it is nothing. Not only must one face the stress of unknown terms and technical definitions, but oh my: the pairing. The right wine can elevate a meal into a symphony, but if chosen poorly can turn things “interesting”, to put in a way.
There’s a silent acknowledgment that many of us, despite our bravado, navigate this list with no expertise and at times no clue at all. Truth is, that one must be an enthusiast in order to retain all the details and info surrounding a bottle of wine. There is so much to consider about how it is made, where, when, how, with what. It takes honest interest to remember the details but none of them really matter when only looking for something pleasant. So making a good choice, might be easier than what it seems.
This dance around the wine list reveals a delightful irony about human nature: our desire to appear knowledgeable, and the value in accepting that it’s okay to not know, to ask questions, all of them, and to embrace the learning curve. To admit your curiosity or even your confusion can be quite liberating.
Make it about adventure, about stepping out of your comfort zone and trying something new. It’s about laughing off the mispronunciations and embracing the unknown. An opportunity for discovery and surprise. Ask things that actually help, like “what feeling does it give you?”, “what is one thing you would highlight about this wine?”. Go as far as to ask if they would give you a small sample to try, many restaurants do. If not available, well, have faith and godspeed.
Take away the stress from it, if you know what you are doing, delight your companion with a match made in heaven and something to remember. If you have no clue then just go for the one with the cool brand name, the grape you remember liking the last time, the country producer you have never tried before, the one with a worthwhile story. Surely something about it will be good. The taste, the moment, the buzz, the mismatch.
Like in life, this selection process is a wonderful mix of pretense and sincerity, a series of guesses and findings, getting it right and discovering something new and amazing, getting it not so good and giggling about a bad bet. It’s really what we are all doing most of the time anyway. So, Cheers!
