The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants: Part 1 – The Unhappy Realities

The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants 1: The Unhappy Realities

In the first four entries in this series beginning with https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/the-ill-served-wine-buying-plebs-1-retail-sources-of-help-and-advice/, I examined the realities confronting wine plebs when they seek advice at off-the-shelf retail wine settings.  In this new series, I extend that analysis to the other major venue for in-person wine purchases: licensed restaurants.

In this series, I examine the wine-related realities that wine plebs face when they frequent dinner restaurants with affordable menus or seek out pricier ones for infrequent, special-occasion, relative splurges.  Wine plebs [as opposed, in this classification, to wine patricians] are all those non-affluent, non-expert consumers of lower-end and modestly priced wines not vinified for significant aging.  This blog is about and for them. This series addresses the realities, limits, character, and pricing of the wines available to them in restaurants they can afford. It addresses, too, the nature of the advice and service those restaurants tend to provide for those who enjoy but lack expertise and broad experience with wine.

Our focus on wine plebs logically excludes from discussion most ‘fine-dining’ restaurants as that formulation is currently applied at the more traditional end of the expensive restaurant spectrum.  It also excludes numerous other self-proclaimed temples of culinary creativity, correctness, or campy-chic cuisines;  the kind that rely on just-in-time conformity to cost-raising trends, on self-determined  standards, and on some interplay of  fusion, ‘deconstruction’, and juxtaposition sufficient to get media and social media attention.  Unfortunately, these higher-end restaurants are where we are likely to find the better, more professionally selected wine lists, though they may also be overwhelmingly encyclopedic, overly in [lock]-step with current trends and crazes, or more aristocratically composed — and priced — wine lists.

If the wine-related goal of restaurant-going is to have access to a knowledgeably-selected and served range of wines, without concern for price, to learn how it accompanies a prepared and served meal;  then, assuredly, upscale restaurants are the places to go.

But wine plebs are definitionally not in position financially to pursue that goal. Nor, even for special occasions, are upscale restaurants the rational places to do so. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare them categorically to be the LAST places that plebs should choose to learn more about wine.

Extortionate wine markups predominate in restaurants at all levels. Industry orthodoxy deems them a necessity if any profit is to be made at all.  This is the norm; the upscale restaurants merely amplify the wallet damage by fixing a higher bottom point to their price range. For by-the-glass wines, this can make a single glass cost just about what a perfectly decent, non-pedigreed entrée would cost at a quality ‘ethnic’ or casual restaurant without patrician pretensions, high-priced free-agent chefs, hip décor, expense-account- or millennial-magnet location, or price-bloating ideology.

There are very few affordably-priced restaurants where wine plebs can learn or discover anything about wine in general beyond — at best if they are fortunate — getting a helpful suggestion about which glass or bottle of wine might be a decent accompaniment to the food they’ve ordered.  Wine bars were supposed to fulfill this role, and some do, but they tend to be clustered in metro areas or in wine country.

For the rest of us, the best places to do so are probably small, first-generation [and/or culturally enclaved], minimally-decorated, out-of-the-way, food-first [not ‘total dining experience’] restaurants serving an un-fused or un-watered down, narrowly regional or ethnic cuisine ordinaire with a small list of less commonly-encountered, and modestly priced, approachably and characteristically flavored, wines from the same general locale or tradition.

In my opinion, these are unquestionably the best places to dine out, regardless of prices. There are many good ones to be found, and not only in metropolitan areas. Unfortunately for wine plebs, the absolute [and even more so, the relative] numbers of immigrants from historically integrated food-and-wine regions of Europe — Western or Eastern — and Transcaucasia [or Western Asian] from modest backgrounds still close enough to their dining traditions  — and for whom opening a small, work-intensive, family-staffed restaurant is an appealing aspiration — have dwindled.

Today, they are likely to be Asian, North African, Middle Eastern, or Mexican/Central/South American. Some of these places have long wine-with-food traditions; others have nascent wine industries pioneered by a few older producers, but for many, their culinary impact is, at best, small and developing;  others have no such traditions of note at all.

For wine plebs, this reality illuminates yet another constraint on their ability to find competent assistance in their exploration of wines in restaurants. The main issue here is the limited wine-list types available to them in these best-case types of restaurants, let alone in the all-too-sprawling profusion of available wine/beer-licensed chain, franchise, theme, varyingly-hyphenated-casual, family, fastish food ‘stores’, and similar options.

With distressing regularity, the wine list offerings in these latter, ubiquitous restaurants tend to be much like the food: uninspired, available everywhere, copied, and adapted or ‘re-interpreted’ in thousands of similar venues, unlikely ever to be out of stock at any level from producer/bottler to local distributor [but seldom with specified vintages].

Understanding how we arrived at this situation requires some explanatory background and a survey of the concurrent transformations that have characterized the U.S. wine and restaurant industries from the outset, and then from the later 1960s to the present. This will be the subject of the second post in this series.