Despite many naiveties, the wine offer improves. The case of a gourmet restaurant, with excellent wines offered at smart refills
In Italian restaurants, people drink better, but much better, than they used to drink a few years ago. This is also due to the continuous qualitative evolution of the products, with wineries increasingly oriented towards enhancing, in an evolutionary key, their particularities, of vineyard, grape variety, microclimate together with an undeniable growth of professional culture. The level of the wine offer in catering, in many cases, is now very high.
Which comforts us, because it is the sign of a consolidation of what we have been writing, saying and hoping for for years.
The road to improving quality and its diffusion, however, is fraught with obstacles: first of all (unfortunately) a certain carelessness in the dining room, where sometimes the authority of a sommelier or a room manager is lacking.
A few examples for everyone: the glass of prosecco served in a glass designed by a Classic Method producer (or the bottle of Franciacorta placed in the bucket of a Champagne house. And vice versa).
Not to mention wines included in the menu which, once chosen and ordered, are then sold out.
Oh no, that’s not right! And an asterisk next to the wine is not enough to justify lack of attention … Just as it is unpleasant to read names with obvious printing errors on the wine list: or more, such as the hand-written cancellations of labels “no longer present in the cellar” or “Excuse us, we have ordered them but they have yet to arrive”.
Just as it is species (less and less, in truth) to notice too high markups. Refills that give the impression of management that is scarcely attentive to the “wine value” and its correct communication / marketing. Fortunately, there are exceptions!
To this proposal, we like to positively point out here the case of a Lombard restaurant (called Aroma, like the Roman homonymous) of excellent cuisine, with a Tuscan chef named Tommaso Verni (eclectic, brilliant, talented) who offers dishes endowed with taste and technique: well, the wine list of this restaurant (near Bergamo, in a high-level Resort, called the Piajo) has labels of the highest level, proposed with a more than honest markup, to confirmation of the fact that you can drink very well, enjoying intelligent recharges, which take into account the level of the place, and which respect the customer, who is not a fool.
Congratulations to the Piajo and its management. Also because, as Angelo Gaja often likes to repeat with a sequential motto, which by now has become famous and which I never tire of quoting, we must DO, KNOW HOW TO DO, KNOW HOW TO DO, MAKE KNOW.
Here, I believe that in the management of wine, from the selection of products in the cellar to the final service at the table, it is essential to follow these few, simple rules.
