By Marnie Old

A wine list's goals should be clarity of communication and ease of use, which will speed service and boost sales. So why do restaurants with smart, snazzy food menus routinely present drab, pedantic wine lists? The simple answer is that most lists are written to be convenient for the management, not designed with the end user in mind. Traditional lists tend to be organized around knowledge that neither guests nor servers possess. The systems and formats that once seemed appropriate and lucid now look outdated and incomprehensible. It's time to renovate the wine list and bring it into the twentyfirst century. Luckily, this project won't require a big investment, only some time and effort. Even better, today's wordprocessing programs guarantee that you don't need a graphic designer or fancy software to make your documents look polished. You probably have everything you need to give your wine list a facelift. Practice these four fundamentals, and your "new" list will reward you, your staff, and your clientele.

A good wine list should be easy to read. No guest enjoys pulling out reading glasses, yet many wine lists squeeze too much onto each page.
• Make certain wine lists can be read in low light. Choose legible fonts and reasonable type sizes. Avoid italics, which run letters together. low light. Choose legible fonts and reasonable type sizes. Avoid italics, which run letters together.

By Piero Selvaggio

Wine rituals in restaurants can be mystifying. When hosts order a bottle, they are always offered a taste to approve the wine before it is poured for their guests. Many people are confused about what they should look for when asked to judge the wine and are afraid to ask. Some are too shy to reject a bottle, worrying that to do so is rude. Others misunderstand the purpose of the sample taste, sending bottles back for little or no reason. Neither of these extremes is correct. Wine should be rejected only if it is truly bad or if it was recommended in error. Since wine is a natural product, each and every bottle is unique. Like grapes, a few wines are imperfect. Wine can be damaged by many factors, most often faulty corks, poor storage, and accidents of winemaking. Although modern winemaking has greatly reduced the number of disappointing bottles, many reasons can cause a wine to be unfit to serve your guests.

From the book "Wine Secrets" by Marnie Old, published by Quirk Books.

By Bill Nesto, MW

Against the background of the Rioja village of Elciego, the violet-blue-silver tumble of the Frank Gehry-designed hotel-restaurant at Marqués de Riscal declares, "Rioja is transformed." Three miles away, at the feet of the Sierra Cantabria, the Santiago Calatrava-designed Ysios winery spreads out in an undulating yellow wave. It sings, "Rioja is this land." Rioja wines have been synonymous with unchanging tradition. These striking architectural symbols proclaim that style—and change—have arrived in Rioja. Bordeaux Begets a New Rioja Winemaking techniques adapted from Bordeaux's producers helped establish Rioja's wine traditions. In the late eighteenth century, Manuel Quintano y Quintano visited Bordeaux, learned techniques used there, and brought back to Rioja superior barrels that required neither pitch nor resin as a sealant.

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By Madeline Triffon, MS

The lineup is the preshift meeting of a professional restaurant staff during which new menu items, daily features, and beverage education are shared with the service staff. As beverage hospitality pros, our mission is to review these new products, learn a little about them, and practice describing them in a manner that will be irresistible to our clientele.

Eyes Wide Shut

Blind tasting, which teaches us how to taste properly and keeps us focused on the wine itself and how it fits into the range of what our guests have enjoyed, is an essential training tool to use at lineup. But whoever is leading the tasting should steer the conversation away from "What is this?" and toward "Is this good wine?"

By Evan Goldstein, MS

Every now and then a book comes out that gets me going. From the world of epicurean stars, they can be positively brilliant (Danny Meyer's Setting the Table), over the top (Ferran Adria's A Day at El Bulli), "new classics" (Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential), and soon-to-be classics. I suspect that Eric Ripert's On the Line may well be in that last category.

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By Jim Clarke

The Rhone Valley's mistral--the cool, drying wind (sometimes cold and powerful enough to knock over trees) that sweeps over the valley's vineyards, slowing grape ripening and preventing disease--has long been cited as a contributor to the quality of the region's wines. The same could be said about the Cape Doctor, a strong coastal southeasterly that blows through much of South Africa's Winelands and into Cape Town. But the wind is just the beginning of the similarities between France's Rhone Valley and some of the Cape's winegrowing regions. It should come as no surprise that South Africa is discovering a natural affinity for the Rhone's grape varieties and wine styles.

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By Santé Editors

With great sadness, Santé reports the passing of Brian Smith, a professor in Liberal Arts and Management at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. Along with colleagues Steven Kolpan and Michael Weiss, Smith taught thousands of students about wine and hospitality during in his 22 years at CIA. With Kolpan and Weiss, he co-authored Exploring Wine (1996 and 2002) and WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Enjoying Wine (2008), which won the James Beard Foundation's 2009 Beverage Book of the Year award. In addition, he penned a splendid little book, The Sommelier's Guide to Wine. Kolpan says of Smith's full, vibrant life, "For more than 20 years, Brian was my colleague and my friend. He had a deep intellect and a ready, often sardonic wit. Brian loved life and he loved wine, and, especially towards the end of his life, enjoyed sharing that love with those closest to him." Smith, who fought mesothelioma the last two years of his life, wrote his own obituary, ending, "In celebration of my life, please raise a glass of sparkling wine and drink to all that I enjoyed."

Chile's biggest winemaker said Monday that is stopping production for at least a week because the mammoth earthquake hit the nation's wine-growing heartland hard, damaging wineries and the transportation network. Several of Concha y Toro's major wineries sustained serious damage in the most devastated zone of Chile, hundreds of kilometers (miles) south of the capital, Santiago, the company said in a statement. "The area with the largest impact is the heartland of wine production," said Concha y Toro. "Our company, as well as the rest of the industry, have been heavily impacted by this catastrophe." The company suspended all production and shipping for a week in a zone where the major north-south highway was severely damaged, alongside harm to seaports in the region that is expected to hurt Chile's important seafood export sector. "We have already been able to assess serious damage to some of our main wineries which are located in the worst affected areas," Concha y Toro said. "This includes important loss in wine and production capacity. A more detailed assessment of the exact magnitude of these damages is currently being completed." Original Source>>

Cnwinenews.com – The wine regions of Long Island, NY and Rioja, Spain became the latest signatories of the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin, a global movement aimed at ensuring wine place names are protected and not abused or miscommunicated to consumers. With the addition of Long Island and Rioja, the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origins now boasts 15 of the world's most prominent wine regions—all jointly advocating for better protection of place names. Other signatories of the Declaration include: Champagne, Chianti Classico, Jerez, Napa Valley, Oregon, Paso Robles, Porto, Sonoma County, Victoria, Tokaj, Walla Walla Valley, Washington state, and Western Australia. "We are honored to join this esteemed group of the world's leading wine regions. Long Island wines, like all those represented in this coalition, are unique. They can't be duplicated anywhere else in the world and today we come together to recognize that nothing shapes a wine's character like its location," said Chris Baiz, president of the board of directors, Long Island Wine Council and owner of The Old Field Vineyards. "On behalf of all the bodegas that make up the DOC Rioja, we are thrilled to join the Declaration partners and express our unequivocal support for the integrity of wine place names," said Victor Pascual Artacho, president of the Denominacion de Origen Calificada Rioja. "No matter where a wine comes from, consumers deserve to know if the wine they drink is what it says it is on the label." Original Source>>

Examiner.com – The upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver aren't just about schussing, skating and slalom. There's some swirling, sniffing and sipping to be done, too. British Columbia is home to two of Canada's best loved wine regions, or DVAs (Designated Viticultural Areas), Vancouver Island and the Okanagan Valley. Both are remarkable in that they are relative new arrivals to the wine world. Naturally they are both mostly cool weather climates and naturally they are nestled in breathtaking valleys and gorgeous gorges. Unsurprisingly, the wines are complex and long on flavor. What's cool about the BC wine region, aside from the seasons, is that roughly 70% of the wineries are mom & pop organizations. Original Source>>

Mercurynews.com – Analysts say wine drinkers will continue to see high-quality bottles at low prices after a 23 percent spike in California's wine-grape harvest last year. The state produced a little more than 3.69 million tons of wine grapes in 2009, up from 3.02 tons in 2008, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture's latest preliminary grape-crush report. That's just shy of the 2005 bumper crop of 3.76 million tons. "It's a boom for consumers, it's a boom for wineries producing bottles under $15 and it's a boom for growers," said Brian Clements, senior partner with Novato-based Turrentine Brokerage, a wine-grape broker. Clements said the 2009 crop will allow wine makers to produce more of the lower-priced wines that have become hot sellers during the economic downturn. At $608 a ton, the value of the crop, meanwhile, grew to about $2.2 billion from about $1.8 billion in 2008, an increase that Clements said is good news for growers. Original Source>>