Anyone remember the By The Glass series I did for Creative Loafing, which fizzled out after a few write-ups? Anyone? OK, maybe not.
But I thought it a good concept – visiting ATL restaurants and checking out their by the glass offerings with a few bites of food. When it comes to wine lists, BTG is so often overlooked, with boring and/or over-priced selections. It’s commonly known that most restaurants try to earn back the wholesale cost of the bottle with the sale of one single glass. Using those economics, you can get a pretty fair idea of what level of quality we’re talking about for most glasses of wine, which fall in the $8-12 range.
Mind you, there are some very excellent wines and values in the $8-12 wholesale range, but it takes cooperation from both the restaurant and the consumer to make that a reality. Too many people ordering by the glass walk in and say, “I’ll have a glass of the house Chardonnay”. If the consumer isn’t even going to look at the list, why bother to carefully select the offerings?
Some restaurants, such as my good friends at Baan Sawan in Columbia, choose to fight the good fight. Sam usually doesn’t even offer a Chardonnay by the glass, so when people ask for one, he says, “we don’t have that, but we have this wonderful Pinot Gris from Oregon we think you might like”. Or Arneis. Or Vin de Savoie. Or dry Hungarian Furmint. You never can tell with Sam, he as an equal opportunity grape pusher.
My point is, Baan Sawan has the best by the glass selection I’ve seen in the South, and they are a tiny Thai bistro in Columbia, SC. I give Sam all the credit in the world, but he’s often fighting an uphill battle with consumers. In Atlanta, just playing the stats (and with the amount of good restaurants), you’d think there would be more restaurants with exciting by the glass menus. At RN74 in San Fran and Bar Boulud in NYC, the sommeliers there frequently tweet about exciting by the glass offerings they will have that night. I think it’s such a cool concept, and can only dream of a place where a bunch of friends and I could go and try a variety of real deal Burgundy out of magnum. There have to be restaurants in Atlanta who could capitalize financially on this idea.
One day.
Excuse my digression – back to the photos on hand. I stopped by Krog Bar the other day and tried a glass of this Monarchia Cellars white wine. I’d never heard of the grape, Irsai Oliver, but it smelled clean and peachy but tasted dry, dry, dry. Somewhat bitterly so, though it’s crisp, but not too acidic, and does go nicely with a bit of food.
I enjoyed sampling the yellowtail tuna with olives and limp arugula (greens not specified as old and limp on the menu, mind you). The tuna was lovely though, and the briny earth of the olive played well with the wine.
It’s a nice small dish, to go with a pleasant glass of clean, uncomplicated Hungarian wine. And there’s no reason they should’t pour you a tall one – the wine retails for $7-8.
