Happy Wine Wednesday! For me it is turning into a fun day, as you may or may not know dear readers, I sell wine for a living! Today I have a menu re-do, meaning I get to write a new wine list for a restaurant! So what does this entail?

This happens to be one of my favorite things to work on. I love sitting with my customers (many are my friends) brainstorming about what they envision for the upcoming season, what is currently working and what isn’t. What can we change and what will the customers revolt if we took it off the list. There is a lot of talking, pre-planning how many wines do we want, price points, regions, overall size of the list. Once a guideline is set-up, then the fun part comes DRINKING! It isn’t uncommon to sample more than sixty wines for a smaller list, roughly thirty bottles or so that will land on the wine list. Here is where the drinking concept changes though, it isn’t sitting around with your friends chatting about work, significant others, kids, economy and the possibility of world peace. It is about discussing drinking wine, we pour roughly two ounces, discuss the framework of the wine, how does it taste, appearance, perceived value, can you drink the wine alone or does it need food? What I mean by that is sometimes a wine will come off rather dull, think plain black sweater, but then you toss on a scarf and it completes the look. Wine is very similar, sometimes a touch of acidity from a tomato will transform the wine in the slightest way and all of a sudden you have something there. That doesn’t make it a bad wine, you need food to bring out the varietal characteristics and sometimes a wine can stand strong on its own, There are occasions you just want to sit and drink wine with friends and there are times when you want to have a meal and contemplate the wine. A good wine list needs both styles of wine.

When sorting out the wines you wonder can this particular wine bring something different to the wine list? Do we already have something similar? Not another Napa wine, maybe something from Puente Alto, Chile instead, lets look at that bottle again. Is it a good value to the customer? All of these questions are discussed in great detail, and after many similar conversations about each wine you get closer to completing a list. Once the wines have been picked, the wine finalists get their names written down, off to the printers! And then eventually in your glasses!

Then the real drinking can take place!