How to choose a wine from a huge wine list

Hopefully one of your summer treats is to visit a really great restaurant. The problem is that they often have huge wine lists. So how does one go about selecting a wine when you can’t find wines you recognise? Vintage, vintage, vintage! In good vintages an average winemaker will make a more than passable wine but it takes an excellent winemaker to make a good wine in a poor vintage.

There is no better way than knowing which are the good to great vintages for the wines you like, and this applies to white wines too! For example, 2021 was a poor year right across France for both reds and whites. But it was a pretty good year for reds from Tuscany, Rioja and California and for German whites. Right, so now we know which vintage we are looking for, which wines?

Price is obviously the next indicator. As mentioned, one can go to the cheaper end in a good vintage. But our favourite game when looking at wine lists is to find the ‘gimmie’, that is, a great wine that the sommelier is trying to move and so prices it as a bargain; comparable wines are priced much higher. The sommelier’s reasons are generally that the wine is getting near the end of its life or that they have too much stock. What are comparable wines? Wines from the same area and vintage.

An anecdote. Some years ago we had dinner in a Michelin star restaurant north of Chablis. We found the ‘gimmie’ – a premier cru Chablis. When we tasted it, it was off. The sommelier offered us another bottle or the same vintage or the same premier cru from another maker. We chose the latter. When he showed us the wine, it was from a domain that we had always wanted to try but was way beyond our price bracket. We thought “Oh well, we’ve been suckered so let’s just grin and enjoy it”. And fabulous it was too! What was even better, was when the bill arrived we had been charged for the wine we ordered! We always recommend Le Cote Saint Jacques in Joigny on the banks of the river Yonne, a feeder river to the Seine.