Recently, my friend Lucy blogged about being served wine at less than ideal temperatures. Which, evidently, based on her comments, my experience, and those who commented on her blog, is a frequent happening. Really, as she said, if we’re paying a premium for a bottle of wine, I expect it to be served at the idea temperature for that wine. (that means I want my sparklings iced for a few minutes and my pinots colder than cabs…)
But I’m going to take this one step further…if you’re a wine bar, or a high class restaurant with many bottles on your list in the $200-400 range (or higher) and you aren’t serving it at the correct temperature that means you aren’t storing at the correct temperature. So, should I ever have $1000+ to spend on a bottle of Harlan Estates, (go Powerball) I expect it to have been stored in ideal, climate controlled area so it will not be spoiled. And if it is spoiled, is it because that "just happens sometimes" or because they stored it incorrectly??
Furthermore, lets talk about wine stores and how even those are room temp. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, who knows, but all the wine shops here are the same temp as a clothing store. Not that I expect wine shops to be 55 degrees, but perhaps less than 70 would be nice. Even "grocery store temp" would be fine. Or even have a high end room, housing things above a certain price point, that’s more temp controlled?
I guess it baffles me that we as consumers, are supposed to know all the rules about wine serving and storing temps, but those who sell us the wine can totally disregard them.
2 comments:
You make an excellent point. About a year ago I checked out a wine store that was new in town and gathering a bit of a following. I was horrified at the tempature in the store. To make it worse a lot of the wine was in direct sunlight! Just as I was about to sprint out of store of wine horrors, I overheard two shop clerks talking about how they'd had some power outages and no back up generator. I was convinced everything in the store had to be cooked and never went back.
I started thinking of the vast majority of wine stores I've been in.
Actually, oddly enough, I can remember only TWO stores that even had a temp controlled cabinet for high end wine.
Both were sort off the wall kind of places, small, not high traffic.
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