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Served: On (Not) Knowing What We Want

Posted by Hannah Howard, July 15, 2008 at 8:30 AM

I blog by day and wait tables by night. I'm excited to bring you Served, dispatches from the front of the house. Enjoy!

A couple comes into my bar. He is sporting a jaunty hat. She, a major tan. "We've been drinking since noon," he informs me. My watch says it's nearly nine.

"What's next?" They're here, so I assume they're still going strong.

"Something sweet," she tells me.

"A dessert wine?" I'm thinking it's that or riesling.

"Yes! A dessert wine."

A Sweet Disaster

After a rundown of our list, we decide on Elio Perrone "Bigaro." It's a ruby pink, sparkly, sunny, strawberry-y Moscato/Brachetto from Piedmont. It's my favorite of our sweet wines.

I pour her a taste. Her face contorts into a melodramatic cringe. "Ew!" she squeals, waving her arms every which way in disgust, as if her mouth alone cannot contain her revulsion. "This is gross."

Rest assured, my good friend Bigaro is not gross. It has plenty of residual sugar, so if you don't want something sweet, you don't want a glass of this peachy, rosy, honeysuckley goodness. But it is a well-made, delicious, and entirely ungross wine.

"What don't you like about it?" For precisely this reason, we always pour tastes of wine before dislodging a whole glass.

When the wild gesticulating abates, she scrambles for words. "It's just...gross." I'm trying not to take her false accusation personally, but failing. It's like she's insulting my best friend, or dissing a warm batch of cookies I lovingly baked just for her. "Clearly you don't like it, but it's not gross," I correct her. "If you help me out a little, I can try to find you something you like."

The hatted fellow squirms a little and apologizes for her behavior. At least one of them is a bit self-aware. "Bring her the pinot noir," he orders.

The pinot noir that we sell by the glass is a dry, mellow, fruity affair from Oregon. There is nothing sweet about it. I oblige.

"It's ok," she says in response to her taste. At least there's no flailing this time. "Can I try the Urban Uco?" The Urban Uco, an Argentinean malbec-tempranillo blend, gets only a blank stare.

She ends up with a glass of pinot noir. Followed by several more.

She's Not the Only One

D. is a friend and a fellow server. He was the wine director of a bountifully starred, celeb-cheffed restaurant for many years. He told me this story about an incident there:

A woman wants a glass of white. She requests something crisp, bright, clean, and refreshing. That's a fairly helpful description, and D. brings her a wine that fits the bill. It doesn't do it for her--not at all. He tries something else. No luck.

He is not new at this, so he knows it's time for plan B. He rummages around and finds an open, leftover bottle from a chardonnay tasting the waitstaff conducted a few days ago. It is a big, oaky, buttery, fat-laden thing. The polar opposite of what the woman had requested. She beams. It's perfect, just what she wanted. D. pours her three glasses and charges something substantial. Everyone is happy.

The lesson, he told me, is to never throw anything away. You never know.

The other lesson is that people don't always know what they want

As D. posits, maybe your family forced you to pick strawberries every summer with them in excruciating heat. Maybe you hate your family. Maybe those outings were so miserable as to tarnish the smell of strawberries forever. It is totally unconscious, but one whiff of the sweet fruit is all it takes to trigger a spell of nausea.

Since you don't know this, I (your humble waiter, not your shrink,) can never hope to understand deep-seated your strawberry aversion. But Bigaro tastes of gooey strawberry jam, and you can't stand the stuff.

We all have things we love and hate. The reasons are largely mysterious. With food, tastes are sometimes straightforward. Your hostility towards eggplant or egg or pickles or parsley can be accommodated with a little skirting around a menu. But wine is notoriously ineffable.

With wine, it's a different story. Most people don't have any sort of wine education. They are on their own. I think this makes wine novices (the vast majority of us) very susceptible to tips and advice doled out by people who may or may not have any business doling out tips and advice. Perhaps the woman enjoyed a like-minded chardonnay with someone who remarked, "Yum! How crisp and refreshing!" Ever after, she is convinced her preferences are for the crisp and refreshing.

Some find it endlessly entertaining to mock wine lovers' tendency to describe what they're tasting and smelling with strange jargon. Are you getting notes of toe jam, petroleum jelly, and canned pineapple chunks? Is there steamy morning breath on the finish? Would you refer to what's in your glass as voluptuous, sexy, and classic in a little black dress?

Wine is multi-faceted and ethereal. That is one of the many things to love about it. That is also one of the things that makes wine hard to talk about, even for the connoisseur, and impossible to pin down.

Your Loss!

"We don't like goat cheese," I've heard about 793 times. Really? I am unconvinced.

J., the assistant fromager, delights in proving the goat-cheese haters wrong, as do I. I love finding people something they adore, especially if it comes as a surprise. Maybe the texture of chèvre weirds you out, but have you had an aged, crystallized goat's milk cheese? A goat Gouda? A goat blue? Try those, then we'll talk.

Lack of knowledge doesn't always correspond to lack of certainty. Food can incite many emotions. For many, fear is at the top of the list.

Maybe you'll find a new cheese you love. Maybe it will come from a goat.

Or not. In that case, have a glass of Bigaro. Before last week, I never met anyone who didn't like it.

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