pop & pour

A great bottle, particularly on a restaurant list for $85!

I’ve been travelling quite a bit for work lately (hence the limited and sporadic nature of my posting in May).  This past week I was in southern Ontario for a couple days and had the chance to eat dinner with some colleagues at a fantastic modern and wine-centric restaurant in downtown Toronto.  The place was built around wine, with a massive temperature-controlled cellar, multiple sommeliers on staff and a huge list of hundreds of bottles covering all points of the vinous spectrum.  Even better, instead of marking up their wines to 2 or 3 times retail price as per restaurant standards, this place took a unique approach to their pricing, tacking a fixed $25 markup onto their cost for each wine on their list and charging only that nominally-increased price to diners.  They basically offered their entire wine cellar to consumers at corkage prices, which is a phenomenal selling feature and an idea that I hope gains greater traction across the fine dining industry in the near future.  As I will describe below, the actual service of the wine was also a thing to behold, with every step from cellar to table carefully handled by a trained sommelier.  It was the epitome of restaurant wine experience…but as I left the place, the only thing I kept coming back to was one little thing the sommelier said as he handed me my glass. Read the rest of this entry »