Today on Serious Grape: Wine and Business Travel

Do you travel for business? I do, and I've been doing it a lot lately. (photo of the bar at McCormick & Schmick's at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel by Paul Keleher)

Eating on the road is a challenge, but managing to get a good glass of wine with your meal sometimes seems impossible.

This week on Serious Grape, my regular column on the food site Serious Eats, I talk about my strategies for achieving something resembling normalcy when I'm dining alone on the road. We're not talking client dinners here--we're talking the nights when you don't have a client to meet and you are in desperate need of something restorative. For me that means interesting, fresh food and a glass of wine with dinner.

Head over there and let me know what you think of how I deal with this challenge. Even better, let me and other readers know what your pet peeves are about wining and dining while traveling and how you cope with them.

Good Wine Under $75, or Is It Possible to Have Wine at a Restaurant without Having a Heart Attack?

I am catching up with all kinds of things, and one of them is my wine reading. I just checked out Lettie Teague's column in the July 2007 Food and Wine Magazine, which was enough to make me reach for the bloodpressure cuff. (image from Menumasters.net)

She was writing about the wine markups on your average wine list. These are typically--and for me, shockingly--2 to 3 times wholesale. That's some markup. If a wine costs $10 wholesale, and $15 retail in the wine shop, then in a restaurant you can expect to see it for $25-$30. And when I see a bottle of wine on a wine list for $25 that's actually worth drinking I am so grateful I'm often on the brink of proposing to the waiter. This seldom happens these days, so no need to worry about the waitstaff! Here's another little secret, however, to make you even more frustrated: restaurants sometimes purchase the wines for LESS than wholesale. Yes, less.

We're told this is absolutely necessary for restaurants to make their profit margin. I wonder. I really do. And I worry. Mostly, I worry about the winemakers. Because if restaurants think they're paying high rent, have you ever seen the monthly payments on a vineyard?

I worry, too, about what these wine markups are doing to the growth of "everyday wine culture" in this country. One of the best ways for folks to get to know different wines is to buy a bottle in a restaurant, decide they love it, and look for it later. That's how I first tasted both Twisted Oak and Anglim wines--at the Firefly Bistro in South Pasadena where their wine is actually priced reasonably! In most restaurants, it's become so prohibitive to buy wine that I usually don't even read the wine list except for the selections sold by the glass. I know this is the least economically sound strategy, but I would rather buy one vastly overpriced glass of wine rather than five.

I'm not sure there's much we can do about this, but if you know of a restaurant with a sensible wine markup and/or a good corkage policy, give them a shout-out in the comments section. For those of you in LA, Colorado Wine Company keeps a low/no corkage interactive Google map. And the aforementioned Firefly Bistro has an unusual and eclectic list with low markups, and great winemaker's dinners like the upcoming event on July 18. Here's to all the restaurant owners out there who make it possible for wine and food to be consumed at the same meal without requiring their diners take out second (or in LA, third) mortgages.

Drinking Italian at Enoteca Drago

We took a friend from out of town to dinner the other night, and because she's an avowed foodie who likes good wine, we decided to take her to Enoteca Drago in Beverly Hills, a wine bar and trattoria-style restaurant that promises to bring a little bit of Italy into your life. Conveniently located on a relatively quiet street (read: not Rodeo Drive), Enoteca Drago aims to be a comfortable place to stop in for a quick bite and a glass of wine when you're shopping, as well as to provide you with comforting food for a full dinner on the town.

After looking at the menu we decided to start with some small plates from their "Enoteca" menu, followed by pasta. The small plates were, in my mind, the highlight of the evening. We had some fresh sliced prosciutto that just melted in your mouth ($8), and some fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with ricotta that were perfectly prepared and very tasty ($12). We tried a variety of pastas, including a spelt spaghetti with fresh vegetables ($17.50), spaghetti carbonara ($13.50), and malloreddus with meat ragu ($15). There was still room for dessert, and with options like coconut flan, gelato, and affogato with biscotti there was something for everyone. My only complaint with the food was that the service felt rushed, with no room to breathe between courses and as soon as you finished your dessert the check was in front of you. The waiter didn't even ask if we wanted coffee.

While the food was perfectly good, and in the case of the small plates excellent, the problem came with the wine. You knew I was going to say that, right? One of the great draws of Enoteca Drago are the flights of Italian wine that they offer. Typically, you get three generous 2.5 oz. pours of different wines for between $15 and $30 depending on which wines are included. We each had a flight of medium bodied whites, and a flight of light-medium bodied reds. They came out with a placemat "cheat sheet" that gave some--though not all--the details for the wines tasted, i.e. the vintage and the type of wine, but not the maker. What's up with that? I insisted on keeping the wine list until we were through out of sheer determination to know what I was drinking. My favorites were the 2005 Mauro Sebaste Arneis, which was crisp and refreshing, and the 2003 Tenuta le Querce Aglianico del Vulture "Il Viola," which was like drinking plush red velvet.

The sad thing was, we were served a corked bottle of 2005 Villa Sparina Gavi di Gavi. I told the waiter it was corked. My friend told the waiter it was corked. He seemed uninterested, and said, "oh, you don't like it?" We expanded our treatment of what "corked" meant: it was mildewy; the wine was flawed; "there is something wrong with this wine and you should tell the person pouring it." We returned two full glasses, and received no replacements, no we're sorry, no acknowledgment from anyone that this had even occurred. Here's my tip: if you have a wine bar, and want to serve flights at the tables, TRAIN YOUR WAITSTAFF ABOUT WINE. There's only so much of the evening your guests want to spend trying to sort out a 2.5 oz pour of wine. After 3 minutes of effort, I simply gave up. Probably the wrong decision, but there you have it.

You can see sample menus by clicking over to their website. Unfortunately, there are no wine lists online, so you can't do a pre-meal browse and see what's on offer. If you are shopping in Beverly Hills and want some small plates and a glass of wine, stop in and see what you think. For me, though, this is one of those restaurants that could be a great restaurant for wine lovers, but falls short by not training its staff on what a wine lover wants from the experience.

red white + bluezz

Last night we went out to a new Pasadena restaurant that touts itself as having great food, a wide selection of wines by the glass, pre-selected flights of wine, and on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays starting at 9pm live blues and jazz: red white + bluezz. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays the sommelier offers "flight school," with topics ranging from how to navigate a wine list to tasting 101.

We all thought the atmosphere was fantastic, with attentive and knowledgeable service. The hits of the evening culinarily speaking were a very unusual watermelon and Maytag blue salad with vanilla-lime glaze ($8), Kobe burger with fries ($18), and a fettucine primavera with hazelnut pesto (can't remember how much it was, honestly). We started dinner at 6:30 and the four of us were out of there at 8:30 after a leisurely, 3 course dinner.

The music had already started at the bar around the corner, which has an open terrace area for smokers and a no-smoking policy inside. We had good seats, and drank some more wine and I tried their "Sophisticated Ladies" flight of red wines which included tasting-pours of the following for $12: A. M. Gille Cote de Nuits; Byron Pinot Noir; and Michael Picard Cote du Rhone. This was attractively priced and presented, with a great tasting sheet with three bright red dots on it. Each wine was positioned over its dot, and inside the dot were tasting cues to help you along. One quibble I had with both the tasting flights and the restaurant wine list is that no vintages where noted. I'm sure they would have told me had I asked, but it kind of detracted from the "we're serious about wine" message to wonder what vintage of Byron I was drinking. Of the three wines the Picard Cote du Rhone was the most interesting, and it was not one of their "wines by the glass selections" so I could not order more.

The crowd was a nice mix of 20s, 30s, 40s, and up. It was particularly great to see a lot of 20-somethings out there with their dotted tasting sheets arguing about who smelled cedar in the flight while they ate Kobe burgers and listened to some pretty great music from Lil' Red's band. We would definitely go back, perhaps focusing on a flights and burgers in the bar like the 20-somethings.