How To Keep it Professional While Ordering & Drinking Wine

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For many of us, ordering wine in a restaurant is as difficult as shooting darts with closed eyes. It's important to educate servers with proper wine etiquette, as this conveys attention to detail and care. Whether your restaurant's customers are wine experts or casual enthusiasts, a polished and elegant way of ordering wine is sure to impress everyone while also elevating their overall experience and increasing the likelihood that they will return.

Here an advice on how to handle ordering and drinking wine in a professional setting. The road to wine enjoyment is often paved with potholes of snobbery and trepidation. Are you drinking the right wine? Are you pairing it with the right dish? Are you serving it the right way? It’s enough to put you off your pinot.

Don’t waste time worrying. Here are some do’s and dont's to help you navigate the path to vinous enjoyment:

1. Don’t serve red wine at room temperature

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Ideal “room temperature” is 50-55 degrees for an English wine cellar. Nothing tastes worse than a glass of cabernet sauvignon served at 80 degrees. Serving chilled red wine (ideally 55-60 degrees –or about 45 minutes in a refrigerator) enhances its fruit, rounds out those tannins and makes the wine’s alcohol level more seamless.

2. Don’t smell that cork

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We’ve all seen movies where a sommelier deftly removes the cork from a bottle of wine and hands it to a diner who takes a whiff before giving the go-ahead to pour. While it certainly looks glamorous, smelling that cork will not tell you anything about the wine.  If in case, a cork breaks and crumbles into the bottle, always sample the wine before rendering judgment. It would be a shame to miss out on a perfectly good bottle based on the condition of its closure.

3. Do serve wines in the right order

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Always go in order of lightest to heaviest, and driest to sweetest In order to appreciate the nuances of the wines you’re serving. Bubbles come first, followed by light whites, heavy whites, rosés, light reds, heavy reds and then dessert wine.

4. Do take food into consideration

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If you’re throwing a dinner party at home or selecting wine for a group at a restaurant, be sure to keep everyone’s entree in mind. You might be in the mood for full-bodied, tannic Bordeaux, but that might obliterate another diner’s lemony snapper meunière. In order to appeal to a variety of palates and preferences, always choose both a white and a red wine for the table. You’ll have happy diners on your hands, and you’ll look like a pro.

5. Do trust your palate

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Wine snobs love to tell you all about wines you shouldn’t drink. So, next time turn the tables and tell them about all the wines you like. Sample a variety of wines from around the world to develop your palate and base your decision solely on your own experience and preferences. If Sauternes is your favorite wine of all time – so be it.

6. Do invest in some good stemware

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There’s no need to run out and invest in a different glass for each grape variety. Try to use different glasses for white and red wine. Having the right stemware can make a considerable difference in your perception and enjoyment of wine, but make sure the glasses should be break-resistant, dishwasher safe and affordable.

Stick to the above steps every time you order wine, and it will go from what once felt like shooting darts with your eyes closed to hitting the ball out of the park and into another stratosphere. Your dinner companions will be chanting your name after noticing your wine etiquette as you make your way around the bases.