Two Sentences About the Fog

The steakhouse is at the back of a casino in Northern Nevada, past the slot banks and a craps table where a man in a Raiders jacket was having a much better Thursday than the rest of the building. Its bar runs along one wall under amber light that makes every glass look expensive. I sat down a little after seven, ordered a glass of red off the by-the-glass list, and asked the bartender what she would pour for herself if it were her night off.

She thought about it longer than most people do, which I liked, and then pointed at the Napa Cabernet I already had in front of me, which had so much new oak in it I half expected a splinter. She said it was the best seller and that the rep who carried it had come in over the summer and poured it for the staff before a shift, along with a few others from the same book. Tucked against the register was a laminated sheet he had left behind, with a photo of each of his bottles and three words under each one, and under the Cabernet it said smooth, bold, approachable. I asked whether anyone from the restaurant had ever walked them through the whole list. She laughed and said that sheet was the training, and that most of what she knew about wine she had picked up from guests who knew more than she did.

The other bartender had been there about three weeks. She told me, a little apologetically, that she didn’t drink red wine at all, and that when people asked her about the list she read them what was printed under each bottle, which on that menu was a grape, a region, and now and then the word “bold.” She was quick and friendly and kept an eye on the whole bar without seeming to, and if I were hiring for that room she is exactly who I would want, someone who likes the place and likes talking to strangers. She just had nothing to hand people once the conversation turned to what was in the glass.

A couple two stools down were celebrating something, an anniversary from the way he kept looking at her, and they had both ordered the ribeye. He asked the first bartender whether the Pinot Noir or the Merlot would go better with it. She said people liked the Merlot. He asked what it tasted like, and she glanced toward the register and said it was smooth, and he nodded the way people nod when they have been told nothing at all, and they each ordered a glass of the Cabernet. The bottle list, which had a couple of wines on it I would have driven across town for, stayed closed on the bar between them.

She had read them well enough. She caught the anniversary before I did and slowed down when she got to them, and that kind of attention is hard to train into someone who doesn’t already have it. What she was missing was a few honest sentences about the wines, which is the easy part, and nobody had ever given them to her.

I don’t think the rep did anything wrong. A good distributor rep is doing the job when the staff remember his wines months later, and this one clearly had. The trouble is that his visit was the only wine education that bar had ever gotten, so the bottles in his bag got a story and everything else on the list went out with a grape and a region, including the wines from small family producers that usually have the better stories, because nobody from those wineries had ever stood behind that bar. Somewhere a winemaker is proud of the Pinot Noir on that list, and the most a stranger in Northern Nevada will hear about it is whatever the bartender can find on the label.

Before I left I asked the first bartender if she had ever tried that Pinot, a wine from the Anderson Valley that was priced like nobody had ever ordered it. She hadn’t. I told her two things about it, close to word for word: “It comes from a valley up in Mendocino where the fog rolls in off the ocean at night and hangs around until almost lunch, so the grapes take their time. One family farms that vineyard, and their kids grew up picking it.” She poured herself a splash while her manager was looking the other way, tasted it, didn’t say anything, and I went back to my steak.

About twenty minutes later, waiting on my check, I heard her down at the far end telling a man in a fleece vest about the fog. She had the valley wrong. He ordered the bottle.

The steakhouse in this piece is a composite of casino and restaurant bars around Northern Nevada, and the people in it are composites too. What the bartenders say about their training comes from real conversations with bartenders here.