There Stands The Glass: The Rules of Pouring Wine

Wine writer and educator Mike Bennie knew what he didn’t want when he opened L’Avant Cave, in Sydney’s Paddington: a wine list. 

The wine bar, a partnership between P&V Wine + Liquor Merchants, which Bennie co-owns, and French bistro Porcine, instead has a blackboard espousing the styles offered by the glass – think textural white, easy orange, friendly red. “It’s a very different model of service,” Bennie says. “There’s no physical document, so the onus is on us to give people exactly what they want and describe it to them.”   

Inspired by Paris’s standing-room only L'Avant Comptoir wine bars (there are three), Bennie sees the approach as a “democratisation” of wine. You can put a literal list in front of guests, but if they don’t have an anchor then what’s the point? “But if you can give [the waiter] a style and they pour you a lusty glass of something ... boutique and unfamiliar wines just become much more navigable.” 

Hannah Green, the owner of the hatted Brunswick East restaurant Etta, will open Daphne, a “community-minded local” this September. “I really want it to be more approachable,” she says of the venture. “Come for a martini and hit the road for bathtime with the kids or bring the whole family for dinner.”

Located just three doors apart, Green plans to overlap key staff between Etta and Daphne for educational purposes. “We don’t really have a wine team, because we’re so little,” she says, although Ashley Boburka, with whom she worked at Rockpool, will oversee both wine lists. 

While wine service is part of staff training, Green says the magic happens on the floor. “During service when real life things happen, that’s when you show someone [what to do]. ‘Cut the foil under the lip and it won’t drip.’ ‘This is what reduction looks like.’ ‘Pass this corked wine around.’ As an owner it’s about empowering people who are incredible at their jobs. Because I can’t do it all myself.”

As head of wine for Lucas Restaurants, French sommelier Loïc Avril — who came to Australia in 2015 with Heston Blumenthal for The Fat Duck at Crown — isn’t supposed to spend a lot of time on the floor, but he does anyway. 

“Service is the most important tool, after curating the wine list,” he says, recalling lessons learned from (the late) master sommelier Gerard Basset, who mentored Avril at Hotel du Vin in Winchester, UK. “[Gerard] really elevated my vision of hospitality, not just service, but of knowledge and being humble about wine education, of being a great ambassador for winemakers and wineries.” 

At Lucas’s Melbourne restaurant Society, where you can drop 5k on a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin, the standard is the same for every customer, regardless of head spend. “Wine service, food service, we should be applying the same DNA,” Avril says. And that DNA is attention to detail. 

Look around you, he advises: Is the guest drinking fast, or slow? Is the temperature of their wine okay? “We shouldn’t take it for granted that every bottle of wine has to be served the same way — we are asking what the customer prefers. It’s very hard to train that, because it’s training how to communicate,” Avril says. 

Green echoes the sentiment: “For me, great wine service reads the room. It is somebody who can pick what you want to drink. Not what they want to sell; not what they want to look at. It’s deciphering from what you tell them in a way that doesn’t shove their knowledge down your throat because they want to prove themselves.”  

At Luke Burgess’ new Hobart restaurant, the 10-seater Scholé (pronounced “skoh-lay”), wine recommendations are just as likely to come from your neighbours as the staff. “People often ask each other what they’re drinking, so there’s a little bit of assisted service there,” says Amalia Oxley of the venue’s shared table. 

Oxley, who runs front-of-house for Burgess, keeps the list of wines short, with just one red and one white by the glass (lo-fi drops by R. D’meure). “That’s not for everyone,” she says. “Good wine service is being able to say, ‘I’ve got you’, opening a different bottle and hand-selling the rest. My motto is to try and say ‘yes’ to everything.” 

While she’s often the only waiter on the floor, Oxley runs weekly wine training sessions with Tristan Dunn, Scholé’s kitchenhand and the 18-year-old son of Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet of Agrarian Kitchen. 

“[Dunn] is doing the dishes, Luke’s teaching him prep skills and I am teaching him about service,” she says. So, what does an 18-year-old need to know about wine? “The first thing is that you’ve gotta understand four basic points of info: vintage, producer, variety/style and the region. Later down the track, when you know what those words mean, and where to find them [on a label], then you can start to learn about all the other stuff.”

While she concedes that most traditional service rules are outdated – serve from the left and clear from the right, for example – there’s one rule Oxley won’t break. “Facing the wine towards the customer feels a bit stale, but it is important, because it’s contact with those four points of information. [Guests] can check it’s the wine that they ordered, and recognising the label is part of the experience.”

If top restaurants are making wine more accessible, the best pubs are raising the bar. “Please, no plastic glasses!” jokes Ryan Edwards, the wine guy at Melbourne pubs the Marquis of Lorne, the Royal Oak and the Sporting Club Hotel. 

“Wine is a very solid amount of what we do in terms of volume,” he says. “At Marquis, it’s neck-and-neck with draught beer, so there’s definitely a thirst for it.” 

While he’s conscious about pricing (“For us, a ‘splashing out’ means $200, not $2000,” he says), Edwards’ venues don’t skimp on the little things, be that table service or Luigi Bormioli glasses.

“The challenge in a mixed environment is consistency of service,” he says. Sometimes you’re opening a Barolo while someone’s pushing past you with a pint; some customers just want you to plonk the bottle on the table and run. “It’s about generosity of time, of being available and listening to what people want.”

There still plenty of bad wine service out there — Green recalls one waiter at a prominent Melbourne wine bar retrieving a bottle from a pot plant before topping up her glass — “but if you’re got trust, if you give people honest opinions, then they’ll know you’re going to take care of them,” Edwards says. 

Just leave your judgement at the door, Avril suggests. “It’s not about you; it’s about the guests. If some guy wants ice cubes in his wine, put ice cubes in his wine. It’s not the end of the world.”