Joyce Yip asks sommeliers and wine bar owners what makes the perfect wine menu and whether the role of a sommelier can ever truly be replaced.
Five years ago, acclaimed wine critic James Suckling thought he had perfected the wine list for Holland America Cruise Line by placing lighter styles on the pool deck and bolder ones in the steakhouse. He thought wrong.
“People didn’t understand it; they kept asking for the whole list,” he says. “Everyone has tried to come up with some form or the other to make wine more approachable. It’s very difficult to get it right. You need the human element.”
Wine menus have taken many forms, evolving from lacklustre catalogues to fun descriptors on a chalkboard, tablet or even on your phone through a QR code.
As sales of most wine categories around the world continue to slump, wine bars are desperate to fill their seats by making the drink more approachable, whilst not underestimating the power of information accessibility and transparency in our digital age.
On-trade venues are now asking whether better, more interactive wine menus can finally replace the prized human interaction – and specifically – an expensive sommelier.
..On the contrary, Crushed Wine Bar – known for its small-batch wines – has long prided itself for not displaying the region and production year on both its handwritten menus and chalkboard display to avoid “preconceptions”, says co-founder Leigh-Ann Luckett. Taking their place are descriptors ranging from the imaginative — ‘The Britney Spears of wine’ — to the more prosaic — ‘mango juice and white asparagus’.
In March, however, Luckett launched Crushed’s laundry list of 80-odd bottles designed to prolong the time between seating and greeting guests. Though unlike Suckling’s master bible, Luckett’s retains the same playfulness with fuchsia-coloured headlines, categories like ‘Freaks & Geeks Orange’ and ‘Butter, Baby White’, as well as interesting factoids on almost every page.
Still, she says the by-the-glass menu performs better and, like Suckling, highlights the importance of human interaction in wine service. Luckett says her small establishment doesn’t justify sommeliers – she is a graduate of WSET Level 3 – but stresses their role in “telling the stories of the winemakers”.
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