How To Order Wine At A Restaurant
The list is built to overwhelm you into pointing at something familiar. Here is how to read it properly instead.
Two people order wine at the same restaurant. One asks for "whatever Bordeaux you'd recommend" in a tone that suggests real authority, and gets handed the most heavily marked-up bottle on the list. The other says "something dry, medium-bodied, around thirty pounds" and walks away with a much better bottle for less money. The first one sounded more confident. The second one actually knew what they were doing.
The list isn't designed to be read calmly
Restaurant wine lists are built the way they are on purpose — long, unordered, sometimes deliberately vague on detail, because a slightly overwhelmed customer is more likely to just point at something familiar or ask the waiter to choose. Applying the grape-and-region logic from reading a wine label turns that wall of unfamiliar names back into information: if you know Chablis means unoaked Chardonnay, half the list stops being a mystery before you've asked anyone anything.
The markup is real, and it's not evenly spread
Restaurant wine typically carries a 200–300% markup over retail, and that markup usually isn't spread evenly across the list — it tends to be proportionally worse on cheap bottles (where the fixed cost of glassware, storage and service matters more relative to the wine itself) and comparatively better value further up. The old advice to "pick the second-cheapest bottle" is well known enough that plenty of lists now deliberately price the second-cheapest option badly, expecting exactly that instinct. Better approach: pick a style you know you like and go by price within that style, rather than hunting for a psychological trick that the list has probably already been designed around.
The tasting ritual, and what it's actually for
When a bottle's opened at the table and you're offered a taste, you're not being asked "do you like it" — you're being asked to check it isn't faulty. Cork taint (a musty, wet-cardboard smell) or obvious oxidation are legitimate reasons to send it back; simply not enjoying the wine you ordered isn't. A quick sniff and sip, a nod, and moving on is the correct amount of ceremony for what is, functionally, a quality check rather than a performance.
Sending a bottle back, properly
Do it if there's a genuine fault — it'll usually be obvious to the server too, since a corked bottle tastes wrong to just about anyone, not only to you. Don't do it because the wine simply isn't to your taste after you chose it; that's a different problem, solved next time by asking better questions of the list (or the server) before it's opened, not after.