Bad Fourrier served badly

Well, it seems that Monday nights at Apiary are a thing of a past, as the wine service this past Monday (from a somm we didn’t recognize) was absolutely awful. Needless to say, we wont be going back.

And the wines sucked, too.


1995 Dauvissat Clos - Sort of a dead, almost musty nose, but this wasn’t corked as it had a gorgeous, honey and oyster blood old chablis palate. Got fresher with air. Half of a brilliant wine; very good as is.
1997 Fourrier CSJ - Fine nose, red fruited, floral, even a hint volatile, but short and soft on the palate. My favorite of the reds, but this was good, not great.
1998 Fourrier CSJ - Yuck, a bad case of 98itis here. A darker nose than the 97, but not as fragrant, with lots of mint, but in the mouth this is filled with hard, bitter tannin. Did not enjoy - dumped my glass (and seeing as I had to flag a waiter to do that (thanks, Apiary!) that’s saying something.
2007 Fourrier Gevrey Combe aux Moines - Reductive as hell; goes to show you can be reductive without adding lots of sulfur. H2S nose. The rotting egg and the fizz is really quite an interesting combo. With air the reduction fades, but even after over an hour, it dominates the wine. Underneath is certainly a more structured wine than the usual 2007, but nothing that blew me away. Hard to get a read on with the reduction, but I’m not optimistic.
2009 Sylvie Esmonin CSJ - Blue and purple fruit, mint, licorice, and an odd vegetalness that must come from the whole cluster. Blind, i would’ve guessed Loire CF from a ripe vintage. Low acid, and plenty of charry oak. Doesn’t taste like burgundy, doesn’t taste like pinot, and isn’t delicious - the trifecta of fail. If this said “Kistler” or “Kosta Browne” on the label, people would be bragging about how much they hate it; because it says Dressner on the back, I’m sure people will try to argue for redeeming qualities. There are none, because this was awful.

the only thing decent about Apiary was the food on a good night.
Forget about service on a Monday night.

For no corkage, I just handle my own wines.

The Dauvissat Clos got significantly better in the glass after an hour. Still not much in the way of fruit, but the intensity of both the honey and the oyster/rocky elements all went up a notch. Last sip was the best. Of course, David, you’d have no way of knowing that since you were forced to dump your glass out after 15 minutes.

I liked the 98 more than anyone else. It had deeper, fuller fruit than the 97, and while there was a lot of bitter tannin I didn’t find it overwhelming. Certainly it wasn’t great.

I took the rest of the 07 (1/3 bottle) and the 09 (1/2 bottle) home with me. Maybe the reduction on the 07 will blow off? Maybe the oak/stems on the 09 will integrate more? I doubt either. But I’ll check tonight.

Here’s a link to the crtiics’ reviews on the 09: http://www.winedirect.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=14558 All very positive. None of us agreed.

I’ve always had very good wine service at Apiary, even on Mondays. Not anymore, this was an epic fail.

The service was way worse than you guys can imagine. One of the worst restaurant experiences I can remember.

I also want to mention that I bought the 09 Esmonin CSJ at Chambers St, where it was accidentally listed on their website at the on-sale/close-out price of the 07 (about 40% off). CSW honored the advertised price, which I thought was very good customer service. Not that it will be news to anyone that CSW has good customer service, but I wanted to give them credit here.

We would have been thrilled to handle our own wines. However, we were not allowed to keep the bottles on our table, which made that impossible. We were also told that we may not have a dump bucket for disposing of any wine in our glasses that we did not wish to finish. These things just begin to scratch the surface of what bugged us.

Slow service does not bother me. Handling our own wines would not bother me. The problem was that I felt unwelcome in the restaurant from the start of our meal until the end of it.

We were also only given two glasses per person for the meal. Busboys kept trying to take - and eventually succeeding in taking when we werent guarding - these two precious glasses, and when they were taken we werent given replacements. They forgot to pour our wines in time for the appetizer, so we hadn’t even gotten to the second reds when our entrees were eaten. The somm, noticing this, came over and, lo, did he apologize? No, he suggested we bring the rest of the wines home with us. We couldn’t rinse the two glasses between pours because, remember, dump buckets were not allowed. The somm offered to bring the glasses to the back to dump between flights, then he and the waitstaff studiously avoided our table for the remainder of the night. 3 - or was it 4? - separate restaurant employees came to remind us of the one-bottle-per-person limit.

This is separate from the “wine service”, which was in turn equally incompetent - bottles were opened away from the table, we couldn’t see the cork, etc etc etc.

It could not have been more obvious from the second the meal began that Apiary didn’t want people there having a wine dinner. Why they preserve the “one-bottle-per-person rule” and then engage in systematic barely-concealed hostility, rather than setting a one or two bottle per table limit, is incomprehensible to me.

I should add that we were not drinking to excess (or at least, weren’t planning to until we were told of Apiary’s new “no ‘wine refuse’ on the table because it 'harms the experience of other patrons” policy (yes, they used those words)). We were a mixed group of men and women. We were basically quiet and minding our own business. We had a late seating, so we were post peak. I don’t think the service could’ve been worse if the somm had walked over, dropped trou and taken a fresh, moist shit on the middle of our table and called it a centerpiece.

The combination of the glasses shortage and refusal to provide a dump bucket is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen in a restaurant. They were basically forcing us to chug the wine if we wanted to be able to taste all the wines we brought.

The glasses shortage thing was also total B.S. While the restaurant was busy for the first half of our meal, for the second hour we were there the place was less than half full, suggesting that many previously-occupied glasses should have been freed up. And yet they kept trying to remove glasses from our table, and never brought us fresh ones.

I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for nearly all my adult life. I always say that Montreal is half New York and half Paris…and I love my city. We have lots, lots of BYOW Rests here. I could not believe what I just read below :

We would have been thrilled to handle our own wines. However, we were not allowed to keep the bottles on our table, which made that impossible. We were also told that we may not have a dump bucket for disposing of any wine in our glasses that we did not wish to finish. These things just begin to scratch the surface of what bugged us.

I

i got a similar vibe from them last time.

food is okay/good. i’m happy to go there and bring wines. i’d rather pay $10 to ensure i’m treated like someone they want there vs. an annoying wine douche that they think they need to accommodate. free isn’t a good deal if it’s a hassle.

Still doesn’t sound as bad as the time the sommelier drained half of our bottle in free pours to other tables and a glass for himself without even asking our permission…

That could have only been the previous sommelier.

guys - check out La Silhouette on Monday nights. Free corkage and a really great somm, Ryan Mills-Knapp.

I see wine service at Apiary hasn’t gotten a whole lot better. Remember a visit there when they refused to provide us with an ice bucket (or any receptacle w/ ice and water) at a Riesling/Gruner dinner. Haven’t been a while, don’t plan to.

There’s nothing so guaranteed to make wine taste bad as a tense, miserable occasion. I feel a little bit sorry for the wines as it wasn’t their fault. I’ve not had the Clos and I’m not mad about the Fourrier 97 but otherwise these are exciting wines.

Back when Apiary started doing Monday night “no corkage” night, there weren’t a lot of upscale places doing that (at least that I knew about). But now there are too many other good Monday night no corkage options to go to Apiary for the kind of service we received last night. Salil, I liked the dinner a couple of months ago at Ciano. I thought the sommelier struck a very good balance between doing what he could to accommodate us (opening the bottles, ice bucket, dump bucket, general attentiveness) and letting us handle the actual ordering and pouring of the wines.

By the way, this is horrible too. Was it an unintentional mistake (e.g. he thought it was someone else’s wine), or did he actually think he had license to do whatever he wanted with your wine?

This is a rather sad post – I’ve only had the Monday BYO experience at Apiary once (this Fall), but had a very pleasurable time. Based on your experience, however, I will likely seek to do business elsewhere on Monday nights. Also a pity that the wines didn’t show up – that was a pretty special line-up you had.

Oh well – at least the Giants won the Super Bowl – that’s gotta count for something!

I’m a 49ers fan. This was not exactly consolation.