You should have a house wine
Every restaurant has a house wine. So should you. (And order it by the case.) Christine Sismondo tells you why—and the best way to get started.
What’s a house wine? Just like at a restaurant, a house wine is generally a crowd-pleaser, something you don’t really think that much about and always have on hand, should you need a last-minute host gift or people dropping in.
Last summer, my house wine was Giacobazzi Lambrusco di Sorbara, a fizzy red from Modena that pairs well with nearly everything and managed to convert quite a few Lambrusco skeptics in my circle of acquaintance. It was a hot and highly social summer, so this dry, low-alcohol (11 percent), lightly fruity refresher was exactly the thing to help us celebrate all the occasions.
Although Riunité is the name most people recall, Giacobazzi was a very popular producer in the 1970s and 1980s. I'm not old enough to remember it the first time around, but I think their new stuff is probably better.
This year, I checked the LCBO site and releases anxiously, waiting to see if it was coming back to serve as our house wine again. Sadly, it has yet to appear. So, I started asking around to see what might be available through private agents and, as luck would have it, I learned Profile Wine Group, was bringing in Medici de Ermete: Phermento—only one of my all-time favourites. It’s a lighter, lower-intervention, bottle-fermented wine, with a light pink colour, sharp acidity and a lively character.
Although I found this by word of mouth, you can discover agents easily on your own. If you find a wine you like at a bar, just Google its name and “Ontario agent.”
If you order three cases, you get free delivery. But, since Phermento isn’t cheap by the bottle (roughly $30), that felt like a little more than I could afford, so I wondered if it was maybe finally time to try to split cases with friends. Two emails later, I had sold two-thirds of the bottles, leaving me with six. I put in an order Wednesday morning and the wine was at my door Friday at noon. As I write this sentence on Sunday, my friends had picked up and paid for their wine.
The sad part of this article is that, even if you stop reading this story now, the remaining four cases may already be gone. Lambrusco’s hot right now; so is low-intervention wine and every other empty space in the city of Toronto is currently being turned into a wine bar.
Lambrusco's back! And better than ever. Like, a lot better.
Don’t lose hope, though. You don’t have to pick Lambrusco for your summer house wine. One of my other favourite choices is Parés Baltà, a delicious organic and biodynamic cava that comes in both white and pink. That was actually my original house wine, sold to me by Mark Coster of Noble Estates, who also sold me on the concept that private agents are the perfect way to source house wine in the first place. Credit where due and all that.
You'll notice Parés Baltà is the house fizzy wine on a lot of bar and restaurant lists. Somms and bartenders know what they're doing.
Why? Because you can pick out something unusual that you don’t see at the LCBO, which is a great way to win friends and influence people. Also, agents deliver—in bulk, which is exactly what you want when it comes to house wine. Finally, once you find a wine you really like, check out the rest of their portfolio to discover other wines you’ll probably also like, since most importers trade in a certain style of wine.
Best of all, you’ll never, ever, have to resort to the Wine Rack again.
BONUS Time-waster: Watch this 1979 Lambrusco ad to see why it was the most popular wine of the era.
You should have a house wine
Giacobazzi someone tonight! I love the idea of a house wine. I'm pretty basic though, so I'd probably choose a fruity California Zinfandel.