How to SERVE WINE Like a Pro: the Sommelier's Tutorial

Serving wine may seem easy. You just open the bottle, pour it in the glass, right? And it's true that may work every day enjoying your wine at home. But there's actually a whole set of different rules that sommeliers that work in a restaurant must follow. I am Jacqueline, and welcome back to the channel, Our Glass of Wine. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about how sommeliers will serve wine in restaurants. Because my husband and I actually passed our exams with the Association of Italian Sommeliers. And in that test, there was actually written questions and lots of different things that we had to know about service and how to present and serve the wine to a client at a restaurant. As well, while it is a slightly different procedure, I do utilize a lot of these same procedures when I'm serving wine during tastings at a local winery that I work for. So let's get started. I've got a glass and I've got my bottle. I don't think this is gonna work. I need to find myself a client. One moment. Have a seat, my client. So at our at-home restaurant, my client here has actually ordered a special bottle of wine. So we're going to go through all of the service steps. First, I'm going to present the wine to the left of the client to show them that the bottle is what they ordered. Today, sir, we have a Barbera d'Asti from Podere la Piazza that is the 2024 vintage. Thank you. Then I will begin to open the bottle. Sometimes this can be done at a table off to the side. Today, I don't have one. So we're going to be doing it here. So you are going to open the bottle like I've talked about in a previous video that I'll have linked below. As we pull the cork out, we are going to be very careful to not touch it with our hands. If we need to, we can grab our service napkin and use it to gently work the cork out, never touching the cork with our hands. Smell the cork to make sure there are no defects in it itself. There are none. If you have a little plate, you can present it to the client at that point, the cork. We are going to clean the neck of our bottle. And now we proceed to allow the client to taste the wine, keeping the label always towards the client. And now I am on their right hand side. I'm going to pour them a little taste, not a full glass, but rather a little taste. Perfect. Now the taste always goes to the person that ordered the wine. Some restaurants may ask who would like to taste, but the correct thing to do would be to serve it to the person that actually ordered the wine. They would be the one that knows the most about it. Now for the service, there are different orders of service depending on the formality of the occasion, if there's heads of state or such. But for a normal restaurant service, we are going to start with the women and go move in a clockwise fashion. The last person to be served will always be the person that ordered the wine and did the tasting. As with the taste, we are always going to pour with the label of the bottle turned towards the client. And we serve from their right, a little glass. We don't want to fill a glass totally full. Then the client cannot swirl or enjoy the wine. This also helps us to gauge how much a bottle of wine can serve. In a restaurant setting, the average bottle should produce between 8 to 10 glasses. To finish off our service, you set the bottle with the label always facing the client. Sometimes we might have a little plate specifically for this. If not, anywhere on the table will do. Thank your client and wish them to enjoy their meal. Have a nice meal, sir. Thank you. So a couple of minutes about what happens if a wine is perhaps flawed or defective. That is part of the reason that sommeliers will smell the cork. You can smell certain defects there. If that's the case, they will probably take the wine away, taste it for themselves to make sure that it is an essentially genuinely defective, or maybe it was just the cork. At that point, service would continue normally with a new bottle if it was indeed defective. As well, when the wine is presented to the client to taste, it's just that little small sip, the client is not actually tasting to see if they like it. You're tasting more to see if there are any defects that maybe the sommelier did miss or that can only be tasted on the palate rather than by smelling the cork. If this is the case, that the client believes something is wrong with the bottle, the sommelier can taste it for themselves to ensure that they did not miss something. If it's a case where the client maybe wasn't expecting those flavors or aromas, the sommelier may try to explain a little bit about the wine of why those aromas and flavors are actually normal. However, it is worth noting, a sommelier should never push for a client to keep the wine. They should offer information, but they should not be insistent that the wine is what the wine is. If the client does not like the wine and the client wants to return it, the client should be able to. So there is a basic wine service for you. Use this next time you have guests at home to make it seem extra fancy. This has been a part of our, let's say wine 101 series where we're helping you build foundational wine knowledge to not only give you more enjoyment in your experience of wine, but make it more fun learning about wine too. Thank you for joining us today. If you enjoyed this video, please leave a like below and be sure to subscribe for more wine education content. It always helps with the algorithm and help our channel grow. As promised, I'm going to leave you with this video here on how to open a bottle of wine.