email this pageQ. I ordered an expensive bottle of wine at a restaurant last weekend and wound up hating it. Should I have sent it back?
A. It might not be much consolation, but you probably did the right thing by not returning the wine. The basic rule is that simply not liking a wine isn’t grounds for returning it. But a flaw in the wine—such as oxidation or cork taint—is always a good reason to send it back. Conditions like these make the wine virtually impossible to enjoy. If it’s oxidized, it will smell and taste unpleasantly old, often like Sherry. And a corked wine smells like moldy wet wood or cardboard.
Now, that said, there’s an important exception to the rule, and that’s when a sommelier specifically recommends a wine to you. An important part of a sommelier’s job is to try to figure out what type of wine you will like. When they steer you to a particular wine, and don’t get it right, it should be on the restaurant’s dime.
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