Simple questions help sommeliers find the perfect pairing

IT’S potentially the most distressing moment of the restaurant meal, when doubt and dread combine to make cowards of us all. One person stands between us and humiliation, one who can smooth the way for success, whether on a first date, in closing a deal, at a family gathering or in a meeting with the boss.
That person is the sommelier, the smiling ambassador who hands us a wine list, an index of potential pleasures that instead is so often seen as a tool of destruction, wielded by restaurants to extract more money than we care to spend for reasons we don’t understand.

The sommelier ought to be seen as a positive force, an interpreter and guide who can shepherd a meal along a rewarding and enlightening path. Yet too often the looming approach of the sommelier provokes the fight-or-flight instinct. Without thinking, consumers withdraw into a protective posture to ward off attacks on the wallet and other sensitive parts.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is how to handle that moment of truth. My answer is simple: Sommeliers can be your best friends. Allow yourself to trust them. They measure their success by your happiness. In fact, the greatest pleasure for most sommeliers is to watch you enjoy wines they love. Your job? Simply to be clear about your budget.

Fear of the sommelier is an anachronism that should have been eclipsed by the food and wine revolution of the last 30 years. Way back in the dark ages of the 1970s, few restaurants had extensive wine lists. The best you could hope for was a short list drawn up by a distributor with a few national brands, barely worth noticing, much less in need of interpretation. Sommeliers were few and far between, but their reputation was fearsome: supercilious snobs who would sneer at you as they ripped you off.

Now sommeliers abound. No decent restaurant serving a wine-oriented cuisine would be without at least a modest list selected by somebody in house. Even small cafes generally have somebody on the staff who can speak knowledgeably about the selections. At the same time, fear of the sommelier persists among consumers, born, perhaps, of the powerlessness that stems from a bewilderment with wine.

Good sommeliers are aware of these feelings and try to compensate.

“To most people, it’s just overwhelming,” said Patrick Cappiello, the wine director at Gilt, a restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan with a complicated yet superb wine list. “You can see the look on people’s faces. The wine list is a date killer, for sure.”

Like many good sommeliers, Mr. Cappiello is part detective and part psychologist. He tries to take in with a quick glance a guest’s level of comfort or distress. Guests already at ease with wine are obvious. They page through the list with a purpose, zeroing in on the best values, perhaps asking specific questions about vintages or food pairings. The confused guest requires more delicacy.

“With a quick few questions, you can home in on what they like and whether they are adventurous,” he said. “It starts off with a real basic conversation. My No. 1 goal is to give them the bottle of wine that will make them happy.”

Thomas Pastuszak, the wine director at NoMad in Midtown, said he usually leads with a series of questions. “If they say they’re looking for white wine, I might ask: ‘Are you a California wine drinker? Do you prefer French?’ I might take an extra 30 seconds and pour a taste of two wines and ask, ‘Which of these flavors do you prefer?’ People might reel at the higher acidity and tannins of Burgundy and prefer the fruit of California pinot noir. They’ve made the decision themselves.”

Sommeliers like Mr. Cappiello and Mr. Pastuszak are at the top of their profession. Not every restaurant can offer such knowledgeable and sensitive responses. I was at a small neighborhood cafe on the Upper East Side recently, with a perfectly appropriate list of a dozen well-chosen bottles. I had one question, which a waiter could answer only by telling me which wines were popular with other customers. Oh, well, it was hard to go wrong.

Austin, Tex., is a small but growing market where not every restaurant has a wine director, but most have at least one person responsible for putting together a wine list, said June Rodil, who recently left Congress, one of Austin’s best wine destinations, to work on several restaurant projects with Paul Qui, a leading Austin chef. She said that in a place like Austin, with a nascent wine culture, extra sensitivity was necessary when discussing wine with guests. At Congress, she trained servers to handle the delicate discussion of the wine list.

“Here in the South, it’s a little easier to have that conversation with your waiter rather than bringing in an outside presence to have a specific discussion about wine,” she said. “If they’ve already established a rapport, there would be no reason for me to change that pace.”