Barbara Werley, one of the world's best sommeliers, is going to speak to my Cordon Bleu wine class today. Each class does a session on wine service, and I usually bring in a guest speaker (being a screw top guy myself).
I'll write something about her visit on Monday. Today, though, I thought I 'd ask the visitors here to share their worst restaurant wine service experience. Tell it in the comments, and the one that seems the goofiest (as chosen by me) gets a prize -- a copy of a new cookbook called Small Plates, Perfect Wines.
And I'll get things started with this, which happened at a well-known neighborhood Italian restaurant in Dallas:
The waitress was having considerable difficulties opening the bottle of wine we had ordered. She was using a waiter's corkscrew, and couldn't get the screw into the bottle. When she finally did, she couldn't get the lever to stay on the lip of the bottle, so she could pry the cork out. She was having so much trouble that it was embarrassing to watch.
We offered to help, and she said no, and kept right on trying to yank it out. By now, she was just pulling, having given up all pretense of levering the cork out by using the lip of the bottle. Still no luck, and she finally resorted to something I had never seen before and haven't seen since: She stuck the bottle between her legs and kept pulling.
That didn't work, either. By this time, the owner had seen what was happening. She came over, took the wine bottle away from the waitress and sent her to the back of the restaurant, and opened the bottle herself. And people wonder why I like screw tops.
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