A cheap wine list lets down restaurants. Don Kavanagh wants a perfect match.
At times I think some bar operators, and some restaurant owners, are idiots.
Mostly, these days, we have a good hospitality industry, with good products served by good staff in good surroundings, but occasionally even the nicest places can be let down by pretty basic errors.
I went to a lovely hotel out west recently for a well-earned weekend break and booked in for dinner because I had heard good things about its kitchen. Sure enough, the food was excellent to the point of being spectacular and the service was beyond reproach. But the occasion, and the venue, was let down cruelly by its wine list.
A good 90 per cent of the wines were basic supermarket brands, the kind you see at aisle ends with posters trumpeting huge price reductions. Now, apart from the food being let down by a lack of top-notch wine to accompany it, the venue let itself down by showing customers it gave little or no thought to the wine list, which is, to me, at least, almost as crucial as the menu.
