Most restaurant wine lists read like my five-year-old niece’s poems.
Nonsensical.
You’ve probably seen them (the wine lists, not the poems). They could be massive leather-bound tomes that take an hour to read and are little more than the Sommelier equivalent to dick-comparison (mine is bigger than yours).
They could be a minimalist list in a hipster small-plate restaurant that reads like one of those three-ingredient food menus.
Cotat. Sancerre. 2020.
However they come, it often feels like they’re designed to purposely trip you up when all you want is a bottle of wine that isn’t going to cost the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment and won’t take you three hours to choose.
I’ve written hundreds of wine lists in my time. Good ones. Ones that give the customer what they need.
Through that, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to read them. Even the bad ones.
After this, you will too.
This is the biggest reason why it’s so hard to read wine lists (aside from “wine is complicated”)
They’re not consistent.
One restaurant might describe wines like: