By DCist Food and Wine Writer Michael Mugmon.
Before putting fork to mouth, DCist considers a restaurant’s prospects by examining the quality of its wine list. If it’s evident that a restaurant owner cares deeply about the wines served with the food, then it’s likely the owner also cares deeply about the ingredients going into the kitchen and the dishes coming out of it.
Too often in Washington, a restaurant’s wine list reveals the owner’s insecurities, her carelessness, or his fundamental distrust of his patrons’ palates (or some combination of the three). In the first camp (actually, an expense-account retreat), it’s not uncommon for an owner to stock his list with bottles of Opus One –- the merely above average, cabernet sauvignon-driven Napa Valley wine produced jointly by the Mondavi clan and la famille Rothschild. Priced at least $175 a bottle, Opus One invites customers and owners alike to use its exorbitant cost as a proxy for quality and as a bestower of status. It’s the pretty red Bugatti that gets miserable gas mileage and spends as much time on blocks as on the road. But you can tell people that you own one, and they’ll still look at you covetously, and you’ll feel damn good about it.
If you’re of the wine-enhances-food school, there’s no excuse for the second type of owner –- one whose wine list goes largely unattended because the owner doesn’t know the first thing about wine and thus cedes control of the list’s contents to the marketplace or to someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the restaurant’s food. Ceding control isn’t necessarily bad; in New York, Mario Batali has successfully tasked Italian wine guru Joseph Bastianich with placing reasonably priced, well chosen wines in Batali’s family of restaurants. But wines should never be chosen without reference to the restaurant’s menu. An owner whose wine list reflects wines that are simply popular or readily available betrays his laziness –- and not only with respect to wine. An owner who allows someone to choose wines in a vacuum betrays her lack of understanding of how wines work with food.
In the third category, an owner selects wines because he suspects his patrons either have no clue what they’re drinking or are too unadventurous to try anything other than chardonnay or pinot noir (the safe red was merlot until Sideways stomped on that grape, Lucy-style). This owner is no better than the snooty French waiter in National Lampoon’s European Vacation; when Clark Griswold asks him to bring out his best wine, the waiter responds in lilted French to the clueless Clark, “I’ll bring you some dishwater. You won’t even know the difference.”
