The most dangerous trend already in place at so many restaurants and wine bars: Wine lists offering too many--yes, too many--wines by the glass. Surprisingly, most of the food and wine media assign huge praise to a restaurant or wine bar with dozens if not more than a hundred wines by the glass. I know I am going to get heat for this one from my sommelier friends with 'ambitious' wine by the glass offerings.

Whenever I visit a place with more than a couple of dozen wines by the glass, I sort of obsess on carrying out an experiment by ordering at least a few of the most obscure or esoteric ones offered. (Sidenote: I always hope that my experiment will yield positive results so that I can offer, without guilt, more wines by the glass than anyone in the entire on-premise universe.) Most of the time those oddball, less-ordered wines that should be fresh and delicious are tired, even if the establishment utilizes a sophisticated inert gas or oxygen pump system. It's such a huge disservice to the customer to pour a tired wine. It is like offering not fresh salad greens. This is a non-premise worldwide issue.

Several of my wine distributors have pointed out that Balthazar's wine by the glass purchases are consistently among the top five highest in all of New York City. As an example, we sell about 15 cases a week of Sancerre alone. I mention this not as a bragging point, but as a way to illustrate that I know how easy it is for wines by the glass to go bad (i.e., oxidize) before the bottle is emptied via guest orders. At Balthazar we have seventeen wines by the glass. About a year ago we had just four more for a total of twenty one wines by the glass, and the two or three most obscure ones would languish from time to time. As a habit I'd comb through nightly-printed wines sales reports and then go to the service bar that morning to taste an open bottle of wine that sold fewer than five glasses in a four day period. Almost always that bottle had lost its freshness, even subtly, and I'd dump it. And inevitably I'd find another forgotten bottle in the back of the service fridge that tasted worse like, well, the back of the fridge, even though the bottle had been recorked with an oxygen pump sealer. And this is a confession from one of the highest volume free-standing restaurants in the United States.

For all of those establishments with ultra-sized wine by the glass programs, I just hope that someone on staff with a tuned-in nose and palate, tastes each and every less popular selling wine once a day, even if that means tasting dozens of open bottles each day. May their accounting department be very comfortable with their dumping a bunch of wine on a regular basis.