Bacchus
Wines on tap in restaurants and wine bars appear to be having their day in the sun. I thought it was a fantastic idea when I first read about it a couple years ago, and it has been de rigeur in small restaurants in Europe for decades, so it’s long overdue, especially in ecologically minded California.
Here’s why it’s cool:
-Less Waste. If only one person orders a glass of wine out of a given bottle in a night, the rest of the bottle is a loss. Wines by the glass are priced to take that waste into account. With a tap system, the wine isn’t exposed to air until it comes out of the spigot- a sophisticated temperature controlled and pressurized system with inert gas keeps the main supply safely sealed. So the restaurant can charge for the wine that was actually consumed. I imagine I am not alone in not wanting to pay for all those half-finished bottles. Not to mention saving all the bottles themselves. A wine keg holds the equivalent of 26 bottles. The savings in transportation costs, packaging and waste can be up to 25%. I think it’s about time that I should be able to have a perfectly lovely glass of wine for the cost of a pint of beer.
-Each glass tastes the same! Since the wine’s exposure to air is controlled, every glass comes out of the system tasting the same as the last.
-Flexibility. It provides a convenient way for restaurants to experiment with seasonal houseblends. Once the custom-blended keg is gone, that particular blend is gone! And that is fine! These house wines are often created for the restaurants, specifically to pair with what’s currently on the menu, the foods that are in season, or what the sommelier feels like serving. A light fruit forward red house blend might be exactly the right thing during the warmer months, while in winter something bolder, heavier, with more backbone will stand up better to cold weather soups and stews.
You won’t just find informal, unpretentious houseblends on tap either. Out the Door, a winebar in San Francisco has 12 wine taps, with offerings ranging from a $4 glass of Free Flow Sauvignon Blanc, to a $16.50 Sauv Blanc from the Scholium Project. That same glass of wine from the bottle would cost even more.
Father’s Office, in Culver City, was one of the first in the Los Angeles area to adopt the tap arrangement. It’s not an inexpensive system to install in a restaurant, but more and more places are installing wine lines in their bars. In the last week, an article in the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle did a run-down on the Bay Area restaurants and others around the country that are embracing the keg-wine-on-tap concept.
