A wine bar without a wine list

Travel, Wine Tourism, and Restaurants Forum
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Dear WBers,

I’m writing to share my odd experience at wine bar “Romea” in Guadalajara, Mexico. Curious to hear opinions and/or if anyone here has been through something similar. TLDR at the end.

The experience:

Made a reservation for 4, showed up early to look at the list but was surprised to hear that they don’t have a wine list. They have about 60 bottles for sale, but the closest thing to a list is a large board that reads something like (prices made up, in MXN):

Reds

  • Burgundy
    • Pommard $3851
    • Fixin $3275
  • Italy
    • Tuscany $1832
    • Friuli $1480
    • Nebbiolo $1609
  • Germany $1521
  • Greece $902

I was confused to say the least. I waved at someone from the staff a conversation that went something like:

Me: So there’s no list? How do I know what I’m buying?

Staff: well it’s all on the board. You tell us what you like, what your budget is, and we select something for you. We can’t have a detailed list because the wines are always changing.

Me: but what if I want to choose for myself, how do I know if “Tuscany” means Chianti or Brunello or a Bordeaux blend or something else? How do I know if the Nebbiolo is barbaresco or barolo or langhe or something else and whether it’s ready to drink?

Staff: well no one has ever asked us for that level of detail. If you’re interested in a particular bottle we can bring it over to your table and then you decide if you want it.

Me: really? Can you bring over like 10? With this board cannot know what is good value and what is not, or what is ready to drink and what is not.

Staff: tell me which bottles you’d like to see and our somm will bring them over.

At this point I ask about 7 bottles and a very young somm (20-25 years old) brings them over. He’s visibly nervous. Goes on to describe what a dry Riesling tastes like. He tells me that the Taurasi grape is low acid, soft, and well rounded - oh hold on Taurasi is a place not a grape sorry.

In the end I ordered a Cava and a Friuli Pinot Noir. They bottles were good quality and good value. Service beyond that was not ideal but overall fine - our waiter was shaking while trying to open the cava. They decanted the Pinot for us. We drank, had some appetizers, paid, and left.

Thoughts:

The bar’s wine selections was actually interesting, high quality, and competitively priced. They had some big famous producers and others small and not well known. But for the love of God, how hard is it to make a wine list!?

I never go anywhere trying to show people how much I know about wine, but this place made me feel like an asshole. Why does this place assume that I don’t know the first thing about wine? Why do I have to make the staff nervous and get multiple people involved just to know what grape their Friuli is?

If this place had a wine list, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. But the first 15 minutes of my visit were the most frustrating time I’ve ever spent at a bar. I was pretty close to leaving. So much for “making wine approachable”. I’m fine going off on recommendations only when buying BTG, but if I’m committing to a bottle I NEED to know what I’m getting.

Guadalajara doesn’t have a strong wine culture, but it’s a major city and Romea has been serving wines for 12+ years. They are possibly the city’s most highly regarded wine bar. What a disappointment, but the fix is so so easy.

What would you have done? Have you ever been to a bar without a wine list?

TLDR: Went to a wine bar without a wine list. Their selection was actually good, but figuring out what they actually sold was like pulling teeth and it made me feel like a prick.

5 Likes
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(for those of you unfamiliar with MXN, roughly, divide by 20 for USD, but as noel made the pricing up…)

Why? All sorts of reasons? I can’t believe it’s “cultural” to list stuff like this so…

i) Removes the need for knowledge and merely makes it a price/status decision for an unsophisticated clientele, just “I heard burgundy is good/baller, let me have some of that”, or “whats a basic red for me”
ii) There may be a wine director/head somm that knows their stuff but is hands off, and the staff are clueless and this is how they worked it out.
iii) the bar is cynically designed to exploit less-knowledgable or less assertive people and part them from their money.

or all of the above?

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Yes, I’ve come across this in Berlin, in a natural wine bar with lots of bottles, which was their excuse for why they hadn’t gotten a list together. It was very frustrating for me, for all the reasons you mention.

And I would say that at the end of the day, part of it is laziness.

But, it also shows how we geeks are not the typical consumer. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing lots of customers at these places don’t really want to pore over a thick list, and are perfectly happy to have a brief personal interaction with a friendly wine server in order to identify something in their zone.

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What if you were shown the whole wine list and saw 10 wines you thought were good value? You might actually want to come back tomorrow. Now you will never know…seems like bad business.

How hard is it to get a couple of basic tablets and just update the list daily?

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Yyyyeeeeaaaah, No.

Unless they’re willing to let me browse their cellar/storeroom, I’m probably leaving, assuming a viable alternative is available.

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I’ve been seeing more of this sort of thing on BTG menus. I’m not a fan either, and it’s basically a signal to me that I shouldn’t be ordering the wine because it feels like there’s something there clearly trying to hide.

I’m glad it worked out in your case. I probably wouldn’t have even made it that far!

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This is my biggest problem with Les Enfants du Marche in Paris. I know I am free to ask for tastes and suggestions, but with absolutely no list at all, I often end up rejecting 2 or 3 tastes and things get palpably uncomfortable.

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There’s a place like that here in Sebastopol, La Bodega Kitchen/Sonoma Wine Shop. We dined there once and it was a very odd experience. They seem to cater to the causal/non-serious wine drinker.

You sit at your table and the server brings you a questionnaire that narrows down your wine preferences by category. Still/Sparkling, Red/Pink/Whute, Dry/Off-dry/Sweet, Full/Med/Light bodied, texture, fruit level, acidity level, tannic level, savory/earthy/austere, pairing ability etc… right down the list. The server takes your questionnaires and comes back with a 3 pour blind tasting line-up based on your answers. One line-up for each diner. You taste and then select which one you want to purchase with your meal.

The concept was interesting but the wines were all entry-level wine list selections from unknown producers. Nice for someone learning about their palate who have a hard time reading a wine list and understanding what to order let alone knowing whetter there is any value to their selection. It was like dining at Grocery Outlet. For us it was a hard stop.

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Needs a checkbox at the bottom for “geek” that gets you the reserve questionnaire :smiley:.

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It’s seems there’s always going to be another way to sell mystery wines.

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Two of the three restaurants we ate at in Stockholm this past October didn’t have printed lists. You had to have a conversation with the Somm to find a bottle.

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Sounds like a great idea for semi experienced people out for a wine experience, terrible for any one just wanting dinner and some wine, and probably for people who know wine in either case.

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I can understand not having printed lists if selection is changing frequently.

But black boards, iPads all work well.

And print a couple of red and White House wine selections on the menu. Unless you want to focus on shifting ‘wines of the week’

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99% of people walk into a bar and say “I’ll have a Cabernet” (or chardonnay or champagne- often receiving prosecco and being OK)

I was at a restaurant in India where everything I requested off the list was no longer available and they finally had to trot out some bottles of what they did have. If the selection is truly ever changing I can understand not wanting to go hard copy with a list- Though it seems a relatively simple thing to have a cheap printer for paper printout- If they truly never get asked for it, I can see their point.

Sometimes I wish I was that person that can just order “a cabernet” or even “a scotch”

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Ah, the prices are actually ball park, not entirely made up. The range of prices in the list was $35 USD for a Sicilian white, up to roughly $200 USD for the red Burgs and maybe something else.

Their mystery champagne went for $120 - if it had been an entry level Pol Roger or Louis Roederer, I would’ve considered buying, but I will never know.

My cava and Friuli Pinot were roughly $40 and $55 USD respectively.

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I 100% get this gripe - Paul Wasserman had the same one when I talked to him about Les Enfants du Marché - but I personally loved the experience. Giving myself over to another author can be a really liberating experience if I’m in the space where I can approach it with curiosity. We drank some bottles at LEdM that I would never have chosen for myself, and they worked beautifully with the food and made me rethink preconceived notions I had about the producers. Drinking something with a sense of deliciousness pre-inscribed can - imo - get in the way of experiencing new forms of deliciousness.

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At what point in the process do they reveal the wine (and price) if you give yourself up and go into it organically?

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Ate at Leo in Brooklyn a while back and when I asked to see the list, the server said “here, wine is a conversation” and that they’d have to select one for me verbally. Instead I just pointed to something on the wall that I reliably recognized and went from there.

It’s an absolutely obnoxious guest experience, between having to go through the whole song and dance conversation of what I do and don’t like, not having any real clarity on pricing from the jump, etc.

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I’m a big fan of dynamic QRs on menus, etc. Rather that having to reprint everything (menus, wine lists, etc.), the QR is scanned by the customer and is presented with an accurate statement of availability, price, etc., which is updated frequently and regularly.

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Very interesting, sounds like someone does not take the time to make one!