THE chief executive who oversees one of the world’s most highly sought Tuscan wines was in New York this month, trying to persuade people to buy one of his less expensive brands, something that would seem counter to his interests.
Giovanni Geddes da Filicaja, of the Marchesi de’ Frescobaldi Group, was drawing attention to Le Serre Nuove, which is known as a second-growth or second-label wine. The first growth, in this case, is Ornellaia, which is considered among the best Italian wines — and costs three times as much.
“We don’t want to call it the second growth anymore,” he said. “It’s not what’s left over. It’s a great wine in its own category.”
Tasting Ornellaia and Le Serre Nuove is a little like driving an Audi and a Volkswagen. Both are owned by the same company and stand for a certain quality for the price. The Audi is the nicer car, but if you can’t afford it, you would probably be happy and safe in a Volkswagen.
But unlike cars, which may have separate dealerships, Mr. Geddes da Filicaja and his fellow producers rely on the same people to sell their wines, regardless of the price or quality. Chief among them is the sommelier — a well-trained wine steward at a high-class restaurant — who probably doesn’t know you and has only a few minutes to sell you some wine.
How does a good sommelier find the right wine out of hundreds or thousands of bottles? What should you tell him so you get what you want and not just the same wine you drink at home (albeit at the higher restaurant price)? Should you trust his opinion?
Is he on the make to sell you something the restaurant needs to offload, like a purple Audi A8, or is a producer giving him some kind of financial incentive to sell as many equivalents of Volkswagen Passats as he can that month?
I put these questions to some sommeliers at New York City restaurants known for their wine. It all starts with the wine list, of course, but in many fine dining restaurants the list is an absurdly long tome for a decision that needs to be made in a few minutes. At the Regency Bar & Grill, the list has 650 choices. That is heavy reading before dinner, but nothing compared with Per Se’s 2,300 bottles.
“I used to work in a restaurant called Cru where we had 4,500 selections,” said Michel Couvreux, the head sommelier at Per Se. “This is just half of it.” In one concession to time, Mr. Couvreux said Per Se’s wine list was on an iPad so he can select a list of just a few bottles to avoid overwhelming a guest.
But a dinner out is supposed to be fun, not a tortured trip through global vineyards. So the person selling the wine had best be sharp — especially if the person ordering it isn’t.
“Maybe at most you have five minutes with the guest, if you’re not busy,” said Jeff Porter, director of beverage operations at the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group, which owns Del Posto, Babbo, Esca and Lupa in New York. “I teach my sommeliers that you have 90 seconds to get as much information from the guest and decipher it in your brain and come out with a minimum of three suggestions.”
If, for example, the guest likes a type of wine, say an Italian Brunello, Mr. Porter said, the sommelier could offer three Brunellos at three prices or three styles.
But even that approach can be nerve-racking for some people who are about to spend several hundred dollars on a wine.
“When a guest is sitting down, for the most part you’re presenting wine to a stranger,” said André Compeyre, wine and beverage director of the Regency Bar & Grill, who spent a decade working alongside the great French chef Alain Ducasse. “You don’t know their budget, their taste, if this is a first date or a business meeting. What I’ll try to do is find some key words.”
Here are several questions sommeliers will most likely ask to get those words and give themselves an idea of what you might want.
Price should be among the first. “You don’t need to be shy about that,” said Olivier Flosse, wine director at A Voce. “That’s nothing negative. You don’t want to impose something or have a misunderstanding.”
He said a great compliment to him was when guests say they had a great meal, a great bottle of wine from a region they had not tried before and did not feel as if they had spent a fortune.
Even Per Se, a four-star restaurant where the prix fixe menu costs $295 a person, Mr. Couvreux said, features bottles of wine as inexpensive as $60. That option is for people who have saved up for a meal there and also for people who would not appreciate the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $400 bottle.
Then there are the questions a sommelier will ask to see if the guests like certain grapes or regions. Do they like cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir or syrah? Do they like a particular style, like oaky chardonnay? Or the most basic: sparkling, white or red?
This approach can sometimes backfire when people think they know more than they do.
“The worst situation is when people confuse dry and sweet,” Mr. Flosse said. “It happens quite often. They say, ‘I’d like to have a sweet wine.’ They don’t mean a dessert wine. So you have to describe exactly what you think they’re thinking, then you bring a wine, and they say, ‘I don’t like that.’ ”
His solution is to bring a sauvignon blanc, a chardonnay and a viognier and let them try. Their choice? “It’s almost always the chardonnay,” he said. “It’s not sweet. It’s a dry grape.”
But the sommelier is still a salesman. Can he be trusted?
Mr. Porter said all of his sommeliers were paid an hourly wage and a portion of the tips. “They’re incentivized to make the guest happy,” he said. “Once you’re incentivized by brand, people will push that brand and you’ll see it all over the room, and that is not what people want.”
But someone like Mr. Geddes da Filicaja has a leg up. He may not like having Le Serre Nuove known as a second label, but sommeliers said that connection had worked to the advantage of the many great and expensive wines that had less expensive second labels.
Customers recognize it.
Mr. Porter said that at Del Posto, the least expensive Ornellaia is a 2006 that costs $600; the oldest is a 1986 for $1,225. A 2012 Le Serre Nuove costs $185.
“We show guests that and explain to them the difference — younger vines, different blend, and it’s a wine that is more approachable now,” he said.
Selecting a wine is not unlike cooking a steak: They don’t all turn out perfectly. And any good sommelier should let you try as many wines by the glass as you would like or take back a bottle not to your liking.
“If they say, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought I’d enjoy the wine, but it’s not what I was looking for,’ we’ll definitely change the wines,” said Mr. Couvreux. “If you’ve been rude and you’re being a nasty person, which we don’t have a lot, I’m going to be offended.”
At the end of a dinner, a good sommelier might just save you from yourself. Mr. Flosse recalled the man who came in around the holidays with eight people, bragging about his great wine cellar.
“He said, ‘Can I have a Riesling from Burgundy?’ and I said, ‘Sir, I’ll do my best,’ ” Mr. Flosse said, without telling him there was no such thing. “At the end of the night, he told me, ‘I want to thank you for two things — you were under budget, and I don’t know anything about wine, and I don’t have a wine cellar.’ ”
But the guest was happy, and that was what mattered.