Annoyance II--The Wine List

The waiter, in his haste, poured the bottle of wine into the glass and splashed red wine on the patron’s white sweater.

“Oh, look,” she said, in mock humor, “I now have a sweater decorated with 1983 Barolo.”

The waiter never saw his faux pas, didn’t hear the woman, and never saw her hastily whisk at the wine before it was absorbed into the fleece.

The incident was only one of several I witnessed and experienced at Bice, where the wine program is one of the worst I have encountered in recent years. Service is condescending and the wines you can get are extremely limited. Moreover, the owners don’t even know the laws, so you are prohibited from taking an open bottle of wine, one you have paid for, home with you, as permitted in California.

My own experiences there were unnerving and, finally, frustrating because of a wine menu that has a lot of wine listed but, apparently, not much of it actually in stock. This necessitated a little game with the staff when I:

* Ordered a bottle of 1978 Gattinara ($35). A manager came over to inform me they were out of this wine. I asked for the wine list again.

* Ordered the 1983 Aldo Conterno Il Favot ($33). The waiter brought us the 1985 Il Favot and hoped I wouldn’t notice the wrong vintage. I noticed. He said the restaurant was out of the 1983. I asked for the wine list again.

* Ordered a 1981 Brunello from Fattoria dei Barbi ($35). The waiter brought the 1981 Brunello from Lisini ($45), showed me the bottle and hoped I wouldn’t notice the difference. I noticed. He then said he was out of the other Brunello and that this one was just as good. I asked for the wine list again.

At this point a manager came over and told me: “When we opened, most of the good vintages were unavailable.” (Actually, most of the wines listed on the Bice list are available from various suppliers.)

So why did Bice list these wines if they never had them? Or, if they had only a bottle or two of them, why do they persist in using a list now so incorrect?

The answer comes from the bottom of each page of the list. This is not the wine list from Bice in Beverly Hills; it is the wine list from Bice in Chicago that was merely transported to Beverly Hills. What the owners did was simply mail their Chicago wine list to Beverly Hills.

But without shipping the wines. They covered themselves by printing this disclaimer: “We apologize if some of these wines are not always available since market conditions are fickle and at times thwart our effort . . . “ Market conditions don’t change that much, how else could Valentino, Trattoria Angeli, Joss and a dozen other places offer wines as good as Bice’s listed wines?

Back to my travails of trying to find a wine. Next, the manager suggested a bottle of wine that sold for $50. Now, until this point I had been ordering wines that sold for about $35. I asked to see the wine list again. At long last, from a most frustrated and exhausted waiter, I ordered the 1982 Badia a Coltibuono Sangioveto ($35, which actually is reasonably priced since the wine retails for $23.50).

The waiter brought the right bottle (!) but upon opening it, he never presented us the cork. Once it was out of the bottle and off the corkscrew, he put it in his pocket, another faux pas. Then the waiter poured the glasses nearly full, making it impossible to swirl the wine. While he poured, he shouted over his shoulder at a passing busboy, splashing wine down the side of my glass.

Then he placed the bottle right next to the candle, so the wine would get nice and warm. (I moved them apart.)

It was an evening when I wanted to sip a small amount of wine and take the remainder home. With about one-third of the bottle yet to be consumed and dinner over, I asked to take the rest of the bottle with me.

The waiter shuddered, left and was rapidly replaced by another manager.

“I’m sorry, we can’t let you take the wine with you,” he said. “It’s against the law.” He said it was legal in New York, where he was from, but not in California.

After a lengthy discussion in which I told the manager that it was flatly illegal in New York but perfectly permissible in California, he made some lame excuse about having been fined over some issue and left, making it clear that I could not take the bottle with me.

The fact is that Senate Bill 1262, the so-called Wine Doggy Bag Bill, was passed, signed into law on April 23, 1980, and went into effect Jan. 1, 1981, permitting patrons to take a “partially consumed bottle (of wine) from the premises upon departure” from “a bona fide eating place.”

Apparently the folks at Bice are not acquainted with this law. Nor are they acquainted with the fact that Californians do not like being sloppily served by waiters with condescending attitudes.