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Fraud behind the bar: Restaurant employees pull the ol’ switcharoo?
Oh. My. Heavens.
Check out my colleague Alexis Larsen’s Lounge Lizard entry entitled “Restaurant busted for serving cheap booze at luxury price”. It links to a Columbus Dispatch story about an investigation by state liquor control officials into the actions of bar workers at Smith & Wollensky steakhouse at Easton in Columbus.
The Dispatch story quotes a source as saying, “Some bar employees were filling premium-brand liquor bottles with cheaper alcohol then selling it at top-shelf prices.”
Could this happen with wines? Obviously, not with wines by the bottle, which are opened tableside in the diner’s presence, but could it possibly happen with wines by the glass that are poured at the bar and brought to the table?
Please assure me. Please tell me that no one would risk pulling such a stunt — or more specifically, such an act of fraud.
Most importantly, please assure me that people would notice.
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Comments
By mel
June 4, 2008 10:42 AM | Link to this
unfortunately there is not a lot you can do to protect yourself from stale wine. however going to places where they sell a lot of wine helps to ensure a fresh bottle. you can also ask how long its been sitting there (you may or may not get the truth). if there are several of you in the party you can always buy a whole bottle or with the new Ohio wine laws buy a bottle drink what you want and take the rest home. that way you know its fresh. as a last resort if it taste stale send it back.By Gabriella
June 2, 2008 12:17 AM | Link to this
Sadly, Arthur is dead on with the amount of restaurants who serve wine open well past the point of consumption. And just to give you a frightening example, the last time I went out to a half dozen Tapas bars with friends in Barcelona, I returned my glass of wine 3 times, once at each bar, for tasting completely oxidized. And the worst of it is that they didn’t even try to salvage the wine each night with a VacuVin. Instead, they simply corked it and served it again the following X number of nights.By Arthur, redwinebuzz.com
May 30, 2008 3:33 PM | Link to this
Mark, There is no reassurance of the “by-the-glass fraud”. You have to decide on a case-bycase basis which restaurants you trust. Bottles destined for by-the-glass pours are often open for several days (if not longer) and some places insist on using those VacuVin pumps - day after day, after day… At that point, how can you tell if you’re getting the real thing?…. Between being open for a week and sucked dry of thier aromatics, even prized collector wines will taste bland and oxidized. Incidentally, I believe wine producers began to mark their corks with logo and vintage when this switcharoo became common ‘practice’ in restaurants of yore.