There's a long-running argument I've been having with someone in the office about a certain brand of wine, and the type of person who invariably orders it.
They may well be wrong about the wine and the people who buy it - OK, fine, it's Nick O'Leary riesling and apparently all Canberra women love it - but one thing's for sure: everyone knows where to get it and how much a bottle costs (about $29).
But that's at the bar, on a standard evening, or in the aisles of the bottlo. When you find yourself seated at one of Canberra's many high-end restaurants, perusing a wine list, you're more likely to go for something different, unfamiliar and, more often than not, expensive.
Most of us aren't trained in wine-tasting, although plenty of us like to think we're a little bit knowledgeable. Still, it helps to have someone on hand to advise.
If there's a sommelier on staff, all the better.
Our own restaurant critic Chris Hansen filed a review last week that got us thinking about wine lists, and who they're for.
The restaurant in question received a solid 14/20, but Hansen singled out the contents of the wine list for criticism.
"Most bottles sit above $200, and a fair number soar past $300. There is precious little under $100. The 2019 Collector Reserve Shiraz that we drank for $118 last time we were here? Older vintages of that same wine now sit at $440 and $480," he wrote.
"This is fine in a Manhattan two-star dining room with a sommelier on the floor, and clientele who don't blink at three figures of cork. But we are in Kingston on a Thursday night, there is no sommelier here, and I can't see a single bottle on a table. Just wine by the glass."
Speaking after the review ran last week, Hansen says while a sommelier isn't essential, a restaurant with an impressive wine list needs knowledgeable staff on hand when it comes to pricing and variety.
You may well have Nick O'Leary Riesling on the menu, he says, but you can't charge $95 for it.
"When restaurants need to make the markups, I think they need to go to the effort to go and find some obscure, interesting wines, and then be able to explain them to people who would like something that they can't buy in Dan Murphy's," he says.
Over at Raku, general manager Nic Clarke is also the sommelier, although technically he hasn't completed the extensive training required to call himself that.
He does, however, write Raku's wine list, a list that, last year, won three glasses - the highest possible score - in the Australian Wine List of the Year Awards.
He says dedicated sommeliers are few and far between in Canberra - although places like Lunetta, Bar Rochford and Such & Such have one on staff.
"I think it's challenging, unless you're one of the bigger restaurants in Sydney or Melbourne, to kind of justify that wage," he says.
"I mean, in an ideal world, every restaurant would have one, but there's so many businesses that are small and just can't afford it."
Up on Red Hill at Lunetta, owner Tracey Keeley says having a full-time sommelier is integral to the experience of dining there.
Eating up there is, after all, an investment.
"You want the experience, and it's more than just wine - it's the knowledge of the wine," she says, likening the wine list to an extension to the evening's narrative.
"Most of us love the story and knowing about the origin of something, and the region, and the people behind it and the connection to place."
She says the sommelier is a kind of "touchpoint" between the diner and their surroundings.
Clarke says when he's not there, the staff are across the list - all 160 wines on the current version - and how to help diners choose the right drop. Something light and acidic to pair with tempura, for example - a riesling or a chardonnay.
"For every single wine on my wine list, I've printed out a brief synopsis on it, its flavour points, where it comes from - basic details that if I'm not there, the other management staff or the senior bar staff, who are generally pouring it, have got enough information that a customer can be reasonably confident with what they're going to receive," he says.
"We've got full tasting notes printed out for the bar staff, so they can say, 'This one on the nose is, for example, red fruit and spice with a touch of tobacco, on the palate you're going to see fine chalky tannins, medium body, good length'.
"I've made sure that they're the key points that the customer wants to know when they're tasting the wine, without it overwhelming them with too much information, or boring them, essentially."
And when it comes to the wines on the more expensive end - Raku has a couple of wines that sell for up to $2000 a bottle, and even sell some occasionally - there's a kind of catch-22 for the sommelier.
'Basically, the people that are coming in and spending this amount of money on wine obviously have the budget to do so, but they're wine enthusiasts themselves ... a lot of these people almost don't want to be pushed into a direction," he says.
"They like if someone can kind of answer brief questions, but they already know what they want. When I'm writing the wine list, I try to kind of cover as many bases as possible."
But ultimately, he sees his job as demystifying the often alienating world of fine wine.
"I think it's really important that the person serving the wine takes the pomp out of it, doesn't try and make it snobby or unapproachable, just to make people feel relaxed," he says.
"It's not some mythical world where you have to know stuff. It's like everyone's learning all the time."
