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Thursday, November 3, 2005
The Dorothy Lane Market Holiday Food & Wine Show — In Your Words
If you’re looking for the restaurant wine prices post, scroll down just a little bit.
Okay, I’m curious to hear what YOU thought about the DLM food and wine show. Tell you what. I’ll go first.
The food was fabulous, an absolute feast of well-prepared, high-quality eats, and plentiful, too. The wines …
…were also very high in quality, varied and plentiful.
But this event was oversold. Especially during the first hour, before attendees got plates of food and found a seat upstairs or a quiet corner to munch and sip, it was gridlock in many places on the first floor. The line for one wine station extended past a second wine station.
The situation was irritating — but only for a while. The crowd spread out a bit, plus the fine food and wines began to work their magic alchemy, and the frustration eventually melted away. It also helped mightily that every DLM employee appeard to be working their tails off to get everybody served.
But the logistics should be addressed before next year’s show. Perhaps fewer tickets should be sold (although no one I know would volunteer to be shut out), or perhaps the store should be shut down entirely for the event.
In the end, the event was a success.
One postscript to those who attended — and this is an issue I wrote about before last year’s Fleurs de Fete — when you’re at an event like this, standing in a long line to receive a sample of wine, get your sample and GET OUT OF THE WAY. If you want to engage the pourer in extended conversation, at least do so after stepping off to the side, so the line can keep moving. It’s the considerate thing to do.
That’s my two — um, maybe three — cents worth. You?
Mark Fisher
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
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Restaurant Wine Prices: Bargain or Boondoggle?
The issue of prices on restaurant wine lists has been, shall we say, uncorked in comments the last couple of days, and I’d like to hear your opinions and experiences on this delightful little topic.
First, David Schildknecht from Vintner Select pointed out that Ohio’s licensing laws that allow restaurants to sell wine for consumption with dinner OR to take home (Sips, Jay’s, the Winds all have retail wine shops affiliated or even a part of their restaurants, for example) have “had the effect — through competition — of significantly driving down the price of wine in restaurants, indeed so much so that in many fine dining establishments, bottle prices are not significantly higher than retail prices,” or slightly over. David says this situation “quickly becomes a topic of astonished conversationâ€? whenever winery owners and winemakers visit Ohio and glance at our wine lists.
But Jens, a Cincinnati-area retail wine shop owner and wine blogger, said down in the Queen City (Dayton’s southernmost suburb, I’d like to think), restaurants “charge 1.5 to 3 times retail …
… on their wine lists. I wish more restaurants priced at $10 over retail. I would buy more, expensive wines and maybe an extra bottle!”
It’s been a while since I’ve ordered a full bottle of wine in a Dayton-area restaurant, preferring the by-the-glass route instead, and even in doing that, I’ve been astonished myself in both directions — a healthy pour of high-quality wine for a shockingly reasonable price, and a microscopic pour of so-so wine for a shockingly gouging price.
What do YOU think of restaurant wine prices in Dayton and around Ohio?
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
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