The Triumphant Return of Carafes

The idea of serving wines by the carafe is old hat in France and Italy, but in America it’s always seemed a bit downscale and tacky. It took a New York restaurateur to turn it into a trend in this country, one that is just beginning to take off in Los Angeles.

Instead of serving plonk by the pitcher, or jug wines decanted into old wine bottles, restaurateurs are discovering the potential in offering interesting and high-end wines in a delicate carafe. For those of us who care about drinking well without necessarily drinking a lot, this alternative to ordering an entire bottle or an overpriced glass is something to celebrate.

I almost never order a glass of wine in a restaurant, because I hate drinking from a glass filled to the top. You can’t swirl the wine. You can’t enjoy its bouquet, which is a big part of its pleasure. It’s also rarely a bargain. When I go out to dinner by myself (which doesn’t happen often, admittedly), if I can order by the carafe, I usually drink better, and happier.

That’s because restaurants that have carafes generally offer a more interesting choice of wines in this format, and the price is often proportional to the price of the same wine by the bottle. If you’re two at dinner, being able to buy a third or two-thirds of a bottle allows you to drink a white or a rose with the appetizer, and a red, or even two, with the main course. And with the carafe, I don’t have to put my hand over the glass every time the waiter tries to pour more wine into an already full glass. I can pour my own.

The trend began in 1998 with the opening of Babbo, Mario Batali’s Italian restaurant in New York. Joe Bastianich, his partner, came up with an alternative to wines by the glass: the quartino. A quarter of a liter, it works out to be one-third of a conventional 750-milliliter wine bottle, enough for two to enjoy a small glass, or to carry one diner through a plate of pasta.

Bastianich got the idea from his great-grandfather from Trieste, who, he says, was a great customer of the local osteria. “His nickname was quarticce, for his habit of drinking many quartinos throughout the day.”

The idea has worked so well that they’ve, in fact, never served a single glass of wine at Babbo or their other New York restaurants, Lupa and Esca. “When you start getting into quality wines, wine by the glass becomes a nebulous concept,” says Bastianich, author of the new book “Vino Italiano” (Clarkson Potter, 2002). “In Italy wines are sold by the measure, so the wine drinker knows exactly how much he’s getting and how much he’s paying for it.”

The most ambitious carafe program in Los Angeles is at Angelini Osteria, where Barry Herbst is the wine buyer and sommelier. You can order five whites and seven or eight reds by the glass, or in a carafe that holds either a third of a bottle (250 milliliters) or two-thirds (500 milliliters). The latter is perfect for two people. Herbst has selected some truly interesting Italian wines, such as a Greco di Tufo, the minerally honey-scented white from the area south of Naples, or an eclectic blend of Sangiovese and Nero d’Avola (the grape that has been called, optimistically, the Nebbiolo of the south of Italy) from Puglia. Or Foradori’s Teroldego, an intriguing red made from an indigenous northern Italian grape.

There are a couple of things Herbst likes about the carafes. If a table is indecisive about what wine to choose, the problem is easily solved by ordering two or three different carafes.

“The carafe thing really smooths over any disputes,” says Herbst. Everybody is happy. He’s also able to showcase higher-end wines, which probably wouldn’t get as much play by the glass, or even by the bottle.

A few months ago, he was pouring the luscious Minaia Gavi--until it ran out. He’s just added the 1997 Campaccio, a super Tuscan from Fattoria Terrabianca, and a higher-end Chianti Classico from Querciabella in the beautiful 1999 vintage. He even sells a Tuscan dessert wine, Isole e Olena’s tawny vin santo, in a diminutive carafe.

Gouging by the Glass

Herbst also sees the carafe as the solution for Angelenos who need to be careful about how much we drink because of the driving we do here. “If you don’t want to order an entire bottle, at most restaurants, you’re stuck with ordering wine by the glass, and that’s where some restaurateurs look to make unreasonable profit,” he says. “It’s bad enough that wine bottles are marked up 300%, but on glasses of wine they’re sometimes making 900% or 1,000%.”

Distributors often discount wines in a wines-by-the-glass program if a restaurateur will commit to buying a large quantity of one wine. The inducement is a larger profit margin per glass. Carafes on the other hand are usually priced closer to wines by the bottle, which generally have a two- to 2 1/2-times markup, but can also be as high as three or four times.

Another advantage to the carafe is that it allows restaurants to work in large-format bottles, says Bastianich. “Importers bring them in, but never know what to do with them, so we can almost always buy them for a little bit less,” he says. “We can open double magnums [the equivalent of four bottles] or imperials [eight bottles] and all these cool sizes.”

For diners, the advantage is that wines in large-format bottles age in a different way and have a different sensibility than the same wine from a normal bottle. But how many times does anybody at home have the opportunity to open a magnificent double magnum or jeroboam? Or pour wines like the ’89 Gaja Barbaresco or ’93 and ’95 Fontalloro as they’ve done at Babbo?

Some wine drinkers, though, are wary of anything served in a carafe. How do you know what you’re really getting? At Babbo, Bastianich shows off the large-format bottles by pouring the wine tableside.

“When we have a five-liter bottle, people go bananas,” he says, laughing. The biggest they ever poured was an enormous 12-liter Cennatoio Chianti Classico riserva. How heavy is that bottle, I couldn’t help wondering. “You need one strong guy to pour it tableside,” he says. “There’s a lot of wine machismo involved--it’s very testosterone-driven wine service.”

Other New York restaurants have followed Babbo’s lead, some coming up with their own moniker for the carafe. At the recently closed Atlas, a high-flier in its day, wines were ordered by the “philip.” Ilo, the sleek restaurant in the year-old Bryant Park Hotel mid-town, serves 17 or 18 “wines by the measure,” i.e., 250 milliliters or one-third of a bottle, from $11 for a Vouvray from Domaine des Aubuisieres to $25 for a 1998 Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon “Calistoga Cuvee.”

San Francisco Import

In San Francisco, Debbie Zachareas thought the carafe idea she’d seen at Babbo would be perfect for bacar, the wine-oriented restaurant she and partner Arnold Wong opened in December 2000. Thinking large, she started off offering 100 wines by the glass in 2-ounce pours, 5-ounce glasses--and 250-milliliter or 500-milliliter carafes. The price of a carafe, she says, is a third or two-thirds of the bottle price.

“Part of the goal is for people to try three different one-third bottles rather than one full bottle if they want to kind of play and compare wines with food. It’s a nice alternative--especially if somebody can’t decide between red and white,” she explains. She’s recently pared her selection down to 64, but no matter, it’s still an astonishing array (supplemented by about 1,400 selections by the bottle).

When technology stocks were at their height, the wine salon downstairs became an ongoing dot-commer party with carafes littering every horizontal surface. “Once the idea of the carafe caught on, everyone thought it was really such a cool way to try wines,” says Zachareas.

In the Napa Valley, Bouchon, the bistro sidekick to Thomas Keller’s formal French Laundry, is playing up its carafe program, too. The Yountville bistro’s general manager, Guy Rebentisch, points out that selling wine by the carafe is a tradition in France.

“We try to make Bouchon as authentic as possible, so we wanted to serve local wines.” In essence, they’re reinventing the idea of house wines. “The advantage for us is that we’re able to get these wines, which in some cases would otherwise be bulked out, and offer them at an incredibly reasonable price. The other advantage is that I’m able to serve things that nobody else can.”

People love the idea of drinking local wines--and why not, if you happen to be based in the Napa Valley and the wines are easier on the pocketbook than the valley’s top bottlings? At Bouchon, the five carafe wines are listed on a blackboard. Right now one of the whites is a Turnbull Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley, which can be found in wine shops. But the rose is a Syrah-Pinot Noir blend from a local vintner, while the reds are exclusive to Bouchon.

“One is a Miner Family Cabernet Franc and then from Michael Havens, I’ve got a Pinot-Syrah blend. And they are exclusive,” Rebentisch repeats with the fervency of a local TV anchor touting a story. He caught Havens with some extra wine, worked out a blend together, and voila. He’s done the same thing with the Miner Family vineyard. Bouchon’s carafe wines are sold by the half-liter ($14 to $16) or full liter ($28 to $32) in glass carafes etched with the Bouchon logo. They’re so popular, in fact, customers want to buy them to take home.

An L.A. Embrace

Well before Babbo, bacar, or Bouchon, though, Campanile was serving wines in carafes. The restaurant still does, in fact, but its program is so understated, you’d hardly notice unless you happened to look over the page of the list devoted to wines by the glass.

There at the bottom is a list of five wines by the taster carafe (8 ounces) or by a third of a bottle, ranging from $13 for a Seresin Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand to $20 for Pojer & Sandri’s 1995 Rosso Faye, a Cabernet-Merlot blend from Northern Italy. The program was set up by Manfred Krankl, one of the partners, when Campanile opened in 1989, and it’s still perking along under the present wine buyer George Cossette.

“I like the carafes because I can get people to try a wine they might not ordinarily try, a Riesling for example,” says Cossette. “And I can offer it by the carafe at a better price than by the glass. Why penalize people for trying something new? Right now, for example, we have this Arnaud Ente Bourgogne Aligote. His wines are highly allocated, and they don’t make much of it. I think his wines are really interesting, but even two cases of Bourgogne Aligote would take me forever to sell, but if I put it on by the carafe, No. 1, I can sell it, and No. 2, give the staff and myself the opportunity to talk about it with people.”

When entrepreneur Paul Fleming launched Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse in Newport Beach in 1998, in order to distinguish it from the competition, he and partner Lisa Lumsden, decided to give the new restaurant a strong focus on wine by offering 100 by the glass. The difference is that they’re poured from a nifty small carafe, which looks something like the sidecar that comes with your martini at Musso & Frank. The glasses, each large enough to hold an entire bottle of wine (that’s some breathing room) are already on the table. The waiter brings out the decanter of whatever you’ve ordered and pours half of the 6-ounce pour into the glass, leaving plenty of room to swirl without any risk of losing a drop.

A few other Southern California places have picked up on the carafe idea, including Water Grill in downtown L.A. With your dozen oysters or elaborate fruits-of-the-sea platter, for example, you could drink a Bricout brut Champagne for $16, a crisp Muscadet from the Loire Valley for $8, or a Central Coast Riesling from Firestone Vineyard for $6.75. The surprise here is that among the dozen wines on offer are two Navarro Vineyards non-alcoholic “wines” made from unfermented grape juice

The latest converts to the carafe are Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne. The Lucques partners plan to present wines by the glass in a carafe when they open their wine and food bar in September on 3rd Street in Los Angeles. They’ll offer flights of wines in 2-ounce pours, along with 50 wines by the glass--served in a small carafe--and a wine list of about 200 bottles.

“I know myself, I have the habit of swirling wine in order to enjoy the aromatics, so I always end up ordering half a glass in a restaurant, or an extra wineglass on the side,” says Styne. “Because when I get a full glass, I sometimes forget you can’t swirl it.”

She and Goin, who is the chef, know everything about their new place, except the name. “We just haven’t fallen in love with a name yet,” Styne groans. “We have to hash that out in the next couple of weeks.”

Will they also be giving their carafe an affectionate little name? That remains to be seen.