Wine by the Glass

There are a lot of restaurants in New York that treat all wine purchases in the same manner.  Whether you buy it by the bottle or by the glass, you are presented with the bottle, offered a taste and then poured a glass. It's a wonderful thing to know that you are being served what you asked for and to be able to check the quality of your libation before making a commitment. I am rarely presented a bottle that is less than half-full. It's something that struck me as we struggled with the wine service in Colorado. The reason for our struggle is that it's illegal to marry bottles of liquor in that state. What that means is that you cannot pour from one open bottle into another open bottle regardless of whether or not the contents are the same. So either you present a miserly looking bottle and run the risk of occasionally running out of wine before the glass is full, or you must find a use for all of that perfectly good wine that is left in the bottles that are not full enough to take to the tables. Apparently this is not in the case in New York. In a very high end restaurant in the city, bottles were married in the service station in plain view of the diners, if they chose to look. Oddly the same funnel was used for all bottles with no pretense of rinsing it between different wines. Now this may seem like a small omission, how much contamination would actually occur? But if you consider the fact that they go to the trouble of presenting each bottle of wine, how much more difficult would it be to rinse the funnel between wines or even have separate funnels for each varietal?  It's always interesting to see where people draw their lines in the sand and what constitutes an acceptable practice in any given restaurant.