Taking Service a Step too Far

Recent years have seen very significant advances in the standard of wine service in restaurants. Although I’d question the right of many of the practitioners to call themselves by the term sommelier, which does infer a level of professional qualification, I generally believe that wine service today is a far cry from the amateurish and pompous approach generally taken in the not-so-distant past.

In this perspective, then, I’d like to relate something that happened to me last Friday night, in the traditional Sydney home of all things French and traditional, Claude’s. Claude’s is a tiny restaurant that occupies a two-story terrace at 10 Oxford St, Woollahra. It’s one of the few remaining fine dining restaurants in Sydney and its traditional, almost Spartan ambience sets it well apart from the city’s habitual glitz and glam.

My wife and I were there as guests of friends and I was asked to choose a bottle of red. I settled on a Guigal Hermitage 1990 $260, which was duly presented, uncorked and served for me to taste. It only took a sniff to tell that the bottle was corked, and very badly so. The waiter, who was also serving food to our table, suggested he fetch another bottle. I agreed. Before he did, however, the sommelier appeared. He spent some time sniffing and then tasting the bottle before our waiter was given the green light to fetch another.

Another bottle was brought into the room. It was duly opened, but instead of being brought immediately to the table, it was left on a bench on the opposite side of the room. The sommelier, I was told, would take care of it. He reappeared and without so much as looking in our direction, made a huge display of serving himself a tasting sample of the wine, which he then smelled and tasted under the full gaze of those of us in the upstairs room. He eventually gave the bottle the okay, and only then was it brought to my table for me to evaluate.

Nobody working in the restaurant had the first clue that I was a wine writer. I’m often jibed at by my friends who say I never get to experience the extent of rudeness, brashness or whatever that they, as members of the public, experience all the time. In this case, I’m certain I did.

Several things rile me about the behaviour of this so-called sommelier. Firstly, just because one bottle of a particular wine – any wine – is corked, it does not mean there is any need to take any extra precaution with another bottle from the same batch, unless of course there is a rare and widespread cork taint issue of exceptional scarcity. A professional should be aware of this, and should not need to change the way in which a wine is presented at a restaurant, regardless of its price.

Secondly, while I was given the opportunity to taste the first bottle of the wine before it was made available to the sommelier for his assessment on whether or not it was tainted, I was only able to taste the second bottle once he had given it a green light. And this was after I had established a 100 track record for picking cork taint in his restaurant!

Thirdly, the wine was not cheap and I was not paying for it. I felt offended on behalf of my hosts that the sommelier was slotting back a reasonable tasting volume of their wine without so much as a ‘by your leave’. In Australia, at least, it is certainly not acceptable practice for any sommelier or waiter to taste a customer’s wine without obtaining some measure of permission beforehand. Common courtesy and respect would dictate the same. On behalf of my friends, who were being very generous, I felt robbed, and unnecessarily so.

Fourthly, I fully believe there was an excessive measure of put-down in the sommelier’s display. It was a show of strength designed to intimidate me into not wanting to criticize the second bottle. He was taking the high ground, and making sure that if I wanted to question the next bottle, I would be questioning him as well.

I have certainly been reminded that there is from time a difference in the service quality experienced by the ‘trade’ and the public. Although I’d like to think that it’s only a negligible difference in the restaurants I regularly visit, some of the angrier stories I hear from my friends from time to time have now taken on a new level of meaning. Please login to post comment