Beyond fortunate is the sommelier with wine samples crowding her/his desk and wine distributors and importers, bottles in hand, knocking on the door. Most of us buying for high volume restaurants are quick to grumble about the time we must take to weed through a lot of options before we find the right wine to pour by the glass, or to list by the bottle. I recall the days when my strategy was to simply plow through and taste all the random bottles on my desk every few weeks when I could no longer reach my phone behind them. Now I plan my tasting more carefully, and it eventually involves brown paper bags.

Every Wednesday at Balthazar restaurant we add anywhere from five to fifteen new wines to the 400+ bottle wine list at the same time we “86” (restaurant slang for “sell the last of”) about the same number of wines we add each week. For wines by the glass, I try to identify the wines I need to replace at least two weeks in advance of the change. This enables me to first sort through the samples in my office to see if any match a needed category and price point (e.g., Sancerre between $10-$13 a bottle wholesale).

My tasting notes are my next stop in the search as I sift through pages of notes from the dozens of wine suppliers (aka, distributors or importers) tastings that I attend each year, and through my tasting notes from wine dinners, trips to wineries, and just about any other place where I’ve tasted and recorded my impressions. If I need more samples for a category, I shoot off an email or make a quick call to suppliers to request that they drop off samples. Almost always, the amount of time I take to choose a $10 bottle of wine far outweighs the time I might take to decide if I should buy, say, my allocation of just released wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

When Balthazar needs a new wine by the glass or carafe I always ask various suppliers for samples, anywhere from five to ten, and I ask them to write on the bottle the best pricing. Then I brown bag them all, not because I want to pretend I’m on skid row, but to taste them blind with Balthazar’s Assistant Wine Director and our Assistant Cellarmasters. I rarely taste in a vacuum to recognize that wine is subjective, and to learn myself from my wine colleague’s palate responses. Even if I’ve tried the same bottles before, it’s important to taste them side by side with other palates and judge by taste alone. Our collective impressions are then recorded in “The Wine Department Bible,” a binder with all of our tasting notes, and pricing information.

As a side note: everyone in the wine business should feel a responsibility to try to mentor others new to the field. These brown bag tastings are educational, fuel healthy debate and valuable to everyone involved. Fun is a big part of it too, even if the samples turn out to be disappointing.

Brown bagging also erases any personal response I might have to a particular sample. Almost all sommeliers I know make friends with some of their suppliers, and I’m no exception. If I don’t taste blind, who knows if I might subconsciously lean toward one wine from a sales rep who just came over to my house for dinner, and brought along that special bottle of 1976 Mosel Riesling.
Finally, even my esthetic response to a bottle’s poorly designed label, or to maybe an oddly colored plastic cork, might push me toward prejudging the wine before I even nose it. How sad if a good winemaker’s efforts are undermined because the winery owner put on the label a beloved family member’s really bad watercolor painting of Bacchus.