Building a great wine list. Part 1: Size Matters?

I’m in the midst of writing a wine list for a new project and our team keeps going back and forth over all the details: how big the list should be, how it should be formatted, and what should we use to present it to the guest. All this leaves me wondering what makes a wine list a great wine list?

At its core, a wine list is a menu of wines on offer. It’s something of a marketing document, really a sales tool to help restaurant staff connect diners with a wine. I want to look at some of the key considerations over the next few days, but for today, I want focus on the Wine Spectator Restaurant Awards.

I’m always surprised by how many people assume a wine list that has received some recognition from the Wine Spectator makes it something to get excited about. The Wine Spectator has three awards with the most prestigious being the Grand Award, awarded to 72 restaurants in 2009. What bugs me about their awards is that they specify how many wine selections the list needs to have:

*Award of Excellence (2,957 winners in 2009)
- "Typically, these lists offer at least 100 selections."

**Best of Award of Excellence (816 winners in 2009)
- "These lists typically offer 400 or more selections…"

***Grand Award (72 winners in 2009)
- "These restaurants typically offer 1,500 selections or more…"

Source: http://www.winespectator.com/group/show/id/about_the_awards
Clearly the Wine Spectator is capitalizing on the fact that some folks wants to have guidance and reassurance that they are dining at a restaurant with a ‘good’ wine list (even if the awards are not difficult to get – more on that below). Restaurant wine lists weigh heavily on my own dining out decisions, and I wish more places would post their lists online. Other publications also rate wine lists (like Wine Enthusiast), but as far as I can tell, Wine Spectator Awards are the closest thing the wine community has to a Michelin star system.


As I said earlier, my main problem with the Wine Spectator’s awards is that they focus on the number of selections a list must have to even be considered. Now I’ve seen horrible 2,000 selection lists with expensive verticals and too many commonly available wines, and I’ve seen awesome 50 selection wine lists of interesting stuff I'm excited about.

I’m only discussing the number of selections as a flaw in the awarding process. It’s seems that the quality, even by Wine Spectator’s own standards, is not an input to the awarding process as exposed by a fake restaurant’s wine list that won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence in August 2008. You can read the embarrassing story here.

Wine Spectator suggests that this hoax on them would tighten their standards on quality, a daunting undertaking. Thus far, the number of awarded restaurants dropped to 3,845 in 2009 (from 4,118 in 2008), though this could be a reflection of the restaurant that closed during the recession.