I recently served a bottle of red wine to a table of five business men. The man that ordered the wine was the person I presented the bottle to. He took a very hard look at the bottle through his glasses. He than replied to me “That will be fine”. I continued to open the bottle of wine at his request and proceeded to give the man a sample of the Cabernet to try, before I started pouring wine for the rest of the men at the table. The wine splashed around the glass violently as the man swirled it in front of his nose to smell. He then picked up the cork to smell it, he took the deepest, longest smell in and says “That will do”. I walked away from the table wondering what had just taken place. Was there rhyme or reason to what the man did? Is there a point this?
In the article “A Guide to the Tableside wine Presentation: What to Expect when Hosting a Dinner” they state that “A wine presentation at a restaurant is a chance for the host to see if the wine is spoiled. It’s not done to determine if the host likes the taste of the wine”. I have walked up to a table with a bottle of wine and had the completely wrong kind of wine, but the wine was made by the same vineyard. In these cases the wines look very similar. This saves me from opening a very expensive bottle of wine for a table that never wanted it to start with. When a server presents a cork it is for the customer to look at and make sure the end that is facing the wine is wet and the sid
e that is outside is dry. It shows that the wine is stored in the proper way. “A Guide to the Tables-side wine Presentation: What to Expect when Hosting a Dinner” says that “If the wine is stored upright for a long period of time, the cork can dry out and the wine can oxidize. If the cork is wet on the end that was outside the bottle, it means that there is a hole in the cork.”
After the corking many people want there wine to be poured to everyone, but the person that ordered that bottle has to sample the wine. The swirling of wine is to make sure there is not any cork or other stuff that may have found its way into your glass. ”It’s not proper to reject a bottle of wine if you simply don’t like it. Once it’s opened it’s yours.”
So there is a science to sampling wine, but lots people make a show of it. I heard from another server that “Wine is like technology. It is always changing and you can never know everything there is to know about it.”
