We all love the idea of by-the-glass. It’s the reality that many of us find disappointing, especially in bars and cafes.
Setting aside the limited range, the particular examples on offer and the often ludicrously high price, the usual complaint is over the lack of freshness. Even if the establishment hasn’t simply served a bottle they resealed with a cork the previous day, their effort to preserve a three-quarter-empty one using a Vacuvin may have been less than effective.
Wine from a different bottle?
But all of this presumes you are getting the wine you asked for. A video investigation by Matthieu Hennequin published by the le Parisien newspaper reveals that visitors to the French capital are regularly being ripped off. As ‘Sarah’ who has worked for 30 years in the sector toid the reporter, it is not unusual to blend the dregs of different bottles to create wine to serve during ‘happy hour’. Cheap wines are often substituted for ones costing four or five euros more. And, she says, tourists never spot the difference.
To verify her accusations, Hennequin visited several cafes with sommelier Gwilherm de Cerval, and specialist wine merchant, Marina Giuberti. The video clip shows de Cerval’s reaction to a cheap Sauvignon he was served after ordering Chablis, and Giuberti’s on being given a wine that was not the Sancerre she had requested.
Under French law this kind of trickery is punishable by two years imprisonment, but I doubt this is much of a deterrence. Who is ever going to see or know that it’s happening? And when it does, it will have been an ‘accident’.
Ideally, customers will ask to see the wine poured from the bottle, but when they are seated at a table, this may not happen. The wine will arrive on a tray with the beers and cocktails. And it would, in any case, be naive to assume that someone willing to switch wines dishonestly would stop short of simply decanting the 'wrong' wine into the 'right' bottle. After all, nobody is expecting to see a server remove the cork from a new bottle when they've only ordered a glass.
Ideally, of course, those same customers will know enough and be sufficiently confident to question wines they think taste ‘wrong’ or oxidised. But, again, in the real world, this is a pipedream.
Mystery wine shoppers
Also ideally, just as brands like McDonalds and Benetton have mystery shoppers who ensure that every franchisee is conforming to their corporate standards, the wine industry would deploy its own teams of experts who’d be charged with safeguarding its image.
Of course, no wine industry body that could do so exists, even if it wanted to but, in France at least, the appellations of Chablis, Sancerre and Beaujolais, for example – all of which are named in the report – could usefully spend some of their funds on this kind of exercise.
Equally, instead of banging on about ‘educating’ wine consumers who have no desire to be educated, we could put more effort into teaching on-trade establishments how to preserve wine more efficiently, and to sell good wine by the glass profitably and without resorting to trickery.
Best ways to preserve open wines
Vacuvins work much better than simply replacing a cork, but they don't work that well if only applied at the end of a day during which the wine has had generous access to oxygen. Coravins are terrific, but cartridges are too pricy for all but premium wines. A good cheap alternative is a large, refillable canister of argon gas and a hose, but it still needs to be used by busy service staff.
So, the best solution to this problem, one of the best ways to fight the fall in wine consumption, and a great contribution to the fight against climate change, would be to switch to greater use of 10-litre bag-in-boxes and refillable steel kegs.
Ideally – my last use of this word, I promise – the wine writers and critics who are so fixated on abolishing the use of heavy glass bottles – which represent a tiny proportion of the world’s bottles – would do far more environmental good by embracing this campaign. They would all direct attention to Jason Haas of Tablas Creek in California who has pioneered and championed both options, and they’d encourage the Perrin family, who co-own that winery, to promote the cause in Europe. Kegs of La Vieille Ferme by the glass would be a very welcome addition to any cafe, pub or bar.
Will any of this happen?
I doubt it. My guess is that we’ll all go on accepting that – outside the best restaurants – good wine’ has to bought by the bottle, and that glasses ordered in cafes will too often be either oxidised or not what has been ordered. Or both. But we’ll still go on saying that we love the idea of wine-by-the-glass.
