Should guru's ratings be included on wine lists?

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 13, 1992 by Mort Hochstein

I PREDICTED IT WOULD HAPPEN, but I'm terribly sorry it did. About a year ago I wrote about the sad practice of retailers who use ratings by such authorities as Robert Parker and The Wine Spectator rather than product knowledge and salesmanship to sell wine. I wondered, in print, when some restaurant would adopt the idea.

Well, it's happened in Baltimore, where the Baltimore Grille at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel recently inaugurated a list that quotes the numerical ratings of Spectator, Parker and syndicated columnist Jerry Mead. F & B director Stephen Henderson, who has assembled an award-winning list and runs a super-high-volume bar in the hotel, defends the practice as a help to customers in choosing wines. Henderson, however, says the system is still being tested and is not engraved in stone.

It will be interesting if Henderson plots the sales of wines with 70 ratings against those with 90s. I hate to see people letting some wine guru make buying decisions for them. Henderson is an innovator, but I hope he doesn't become a trend setter.

Mass in a pub: "Why not?" asked Father Larry David McCormick, pastor of Holy Trinity parish in North Bergen N.J., and so on Dec. 26 he celebrated mass for Saint Stephen's Day in the North Star Pub in the South Street Seaport in New York City. The day is popularly known in Great Britain as Boxing Day, the day on which charitable citizens would provide boxes of food for less fortunate members of the community. North Star has traditionally enlisted its customers and staff to collect food for the needy of New York and has also celebrated the non-hostile holiday by providing free bangers and mash--English sausage and mashed potatoes--to all customers.

B.Y.O.B to a hotel?: New ad campaign for B&B shows photo of young couple preparing to open a bottle and enjoy a drink. The woman holds a hotel "Do Not Disturb" doorknob sign in her hand, and the ad is headlined: "B.Y.O.B & a la chambre 914." I don't think that ad, which may have had a first run in France, will sit well with American F & B directors who sell room service and mini-bar bottles to their hotel guests.

Attention owners of: Lafite Rothschild, Carruades de Lafite and Ch. Duhart Milon Rothschild: The recorking team from Lafite, which hasn't been in this country since '89, will return in May. This time around they'll be recorking and topping up wines from the 1966 vintage or earlier. They'll visit New York, Washington, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Los Angeles. Members of the trade who want thi free service should contact Ms. Setta Tavitan, Chateau and Estates, 375 Park Ave., New York 10152 for reservations. Deadline is Jan. 30.

Virgin reprieved: Almost a quarter of a century ago, Richard Bran Son, the energetic record promoter, merchandiser and founder of Virgin Airways, was convicted by a British court of poaching pigeons on a country estate. When, about five years ago, Branson asked American authorities to grant a liquor license so that he might take alcoholic beverages on board his jumbo jets in the United States, he was turned down because of that criminal record. But the Federal Aviation Administration relented just a few months ago. Branson, now 41, said at a meeting of the Aviation Club in London that he didn't know why the American agency changed its mind, but it may have been because he now wears a bow tie.

Motivated: If anything would make me move to Milwaukee, it might be really good root beer, and that's where it can be found. During the 14 years of Prohibition, the August Schell Brewing Co. in New Ulm, Minn., stayed alive by brewing draft root beer and related candy products.

When Prohibition ended, Schell puts its energies back into the beer business and dropped the soft drink. About a dozen years ago, a Schell division, Ulmer Brewing, reintroduced 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer in large containers, no cans or bottles, and it's now prospering in a five-state area of the upper Midwest. But sadly, not in New York. Ted Marti, president of Schell, said the firm is one of the few that prospered during Prohibition.

Brief notes: Scott Carney, manager and wine buyer for the Gotham Grill in Manhattan, has been named a Master Sommelier by the Court of Master Sommeliers in London. Only 35 persons, 18 of them Americans, have passed the rigid British examination... Scotch up, it's not happening in the United States, but on a domestic and worldwide basis, sales of scotch whiskey showed a 10-percent increase for the first six months of the year.