There are public dining conventions and rituals that we as a society have accepted as gospel. For instance, you must take one only bread roll out of the basket at a wedding, lest you be labelled an oaf or commit the mortal sin of denying someone else their piece of sourdough.
You must deny, deny, deny that you would ever even consider a dessert but then fall on the little pile of spoons brought by your server and cleave slivers of chocolate fondant from the shared plate, protesting all the time that you’re “not usually a sweets person” while your partner side-eyes you in the knowledge that you can and regularly do polish off a tub of Ben & Jerry’s during an episode of Home of the Year.
The most ridiculous of them all though is the dance of the wines. First the perusal of the list, hmming and hawing over what “sounds nice” and saying the names you recognise out loud in a confident manner: “Oh I had a lovely Montepulciano last week.” You engage in this charade for a minute or two before the decision everybody knew was made before you even sat down plays out and you order the second cheapest bottle of wine on the list.
You are too worldly, too well-travelled and honestly too well off to order the cheapest. Opting for the second cheapest suggests helicopters, mansions and blacked out Mercedes vans picking you up from this affordable yet chic restaurant. Ordering anything more expensive is gauche but, more importantly, pointless because it all essentially tastes the same.
When the wine comes there’s another charade around trying a little drop to make sure it’s not “corked”, even though you’ve probably imbibed dozens of corked bottles over the years and thought them delicious. You joke with the waiter about sending it back and they laugh but secretly hope that you choke on your chicken medley. And the world spins on.
I recently had an experience that threw a spanner in the works of the dance of the wines. It was a fairly fancy establishment and I ordered a glass of wine, rather than a bottle. My companion and I had opted not to make absolute beasts of ourselves by drinking a bottle each and frankly were afraid of even the second cheapest option.
My wine education has more or less stagnated, and my palette rejects only the most enamel-stripping of offerings
Confronted with the “by the glass” menu, I became blinded by panic when none of my wine safe words jumped out at me. No Malbec, no Tempranillo, not even a reliable Cab Sav. My eyes flitted over the whites and past an orange wine which I briefly considered and then dismissed as a potential faux pas. “I’ll have the Portuguese red,” I announced, closing the menu with what I hoped was confidence and nonchalance, praying that there was only one Portuguese red on the list.
Not for the first time I chided myself for being a wine lout. There hasn’t been a lot of growth since my late teens when I would choke down a bottle of pure acid masquerading as a Sauvignon Blanc, drinking it as a means to an end. I rejected red wine vehemently because it looked “like it tastes warm” and that was not something I was interested in experimenting with.
When I finally succumbed to a glass of red at a wedding only because all the complimentary white had already been snaffled, I was thrilled to find that I liked it and considered myself promoted to the rank of sommelier. There my wine education has more or less stagnated, and my palette rejects only the most enamel-stripping of offerings.
The Portuguese red was a success that evening, to my relief. Buoyed by this I ordered the orange wine with dessert (after a brief round of dessert denial) having just recently read a Bon Appétit article announcing that this “easy-to-order, 8,000-year-old overnight sensation” is “uniquely situated to introduce casual wine drinkers to insider-y conversations about wine grapes, production [and] history”. The only conversation I felt compelled to make about it was that it tasted “empty” and I’m not sure that qualifies as official wine speak. Nonetheless I persevered and the orange wine was much improved when not overpowered by the sweetness of the dessert.
My friends and I have already christened the coming months “Orange wine summer”. We expect to be invited to the most exclusive restaurants on one of the Rivieras, where we will doggedly order the second cheapest wine on the menu, as long as it’s orange.