SHOULD THE SOMMELIER taste your wine before you do? It seems like such a simple question, and yet it is one that can provoke a surprisingly heated debate among oenophiles—professionals and amateurs alike.

Wine drinkers who answer in the affirmative might point to a long history of wine service that dictates the sommelier sample each bottle before it is served. Common in more formal (and mostly French) restaurants—or establishments where there is a particularly complex or expensive list—the practice is meant to ensure diners don’t unwittingly end up with a wine that was corked, oxidized or otherwise flawed. (Corked means infected with a chemical compound called trichloroanisole, or TCA; oxidized refers to a wine that has been somehow exposed to oxygen, which has a deleterious effect on wine over time.)

My friend Bruce likes the sommelier to taste before he does. He says it takes away the anxiety of deciding if the bottle is good or not. “The more expensive the wine, the greater the pressure,” he said.

Although a pretasting might sound reasonable, even desirable, some drinkers I know don’t like it at all, in part because they think they are perfectly capable of evaluating a wine themselves. My friend Alan is particularly opposed to the practice. He regards it as pretentious and snobbish, and a not-too-subtle means of cadging a glass (some sommeliers don’t spit out the wine). “I don’t see that any good can come of it,” Alan said. “If the wine is good, you’ve wasted time and wine.”

Alan doesn’t believe there are as many bad bottles floating around as sommeliers might claim they’ve discovered through their screening. And even if the wine is truly bad, Alan further contended, he doesn’t trust the sommelier to tell him the truth. When have you ever had a sommelier grimace and grab the bottle away after tasting it? he asked. In all his years of restaurant going, this has never happened to Alan, although he has had a wine the somm tasted turn out to be slightly corked.

Alan’s view is admittedly darker than most. But one practice that many drinkers and professionals alike don’t approve of is the sommelier’s showing the bottle, then tasting the wine somewhere out of sight.

Matt Reiser, wine director at Piripi restaurant in Miami (opening later this fall), always opens the bottle within view of the diners for exactly this reason. “I’ve always said it has to be in front of the guest,” he said.

Mr. Reiser, who worked as a sommelier in restaurants in Boston and New York before moving to Miami, understands how sommelier tasting could be seen as “kind of snotty,” and yet he rarely en-counters resistance save for one particularly memorable occasion.

The restaurant was Upstairs on the Square, in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Reiser was working. A man in his mid-40s ordered the 2005 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche, a rare and sought-after Burgundy, from the list. The $2,400 wine really wasn’t ready to drink, Mr. Reiser told the diner, but the man nevertheless insisted on ordering it.

When Mr. Reiser opened the bottle, he smelled “something like dirty basement,” but when he mentioned this, the man accused Mr. Reiser of trying to get a free taste of his wine. Mr. Reiser was so shocked by the accusation, he said, “it de-stroyed the inner core of my being.” A touch hyperbolic perhaps, but it reflects how seriously Mr. Reiser takes his role as what he calls “the diner’s defender,” the wall between a bad wine and a customer’s glass.

For his part, Mr. Reiser said he is happy to have superstar New York sommeliers such as Aldo Sohm, of Le Bernardin, and Michael Madrigale, of Bar Boulud and Boulud Sud, taste a bottle before he does. “They’re like the Carfax of wine,” said Mr. Reiser, referring to the database of choice for wary buyers of used cars.

“The Carfax of wine—I like that,” said Mr. Madrigale when I shared the sobriquet with him while dining at Boulud Sud later that week. Mr. Madrigale tastes every bottle he opens, and like Mr. Reiser, he does so within view of the dining room. He stands at a service station along the wall next to the kitchen.

Does anyone object? “One out of 100 times,” he said, “someone will say, ‘So, how does it taste?’ ” This was what Mr. Madrigale described as “a passive aggressive way of saying ‘I saw you taste my wine.’ ” Mr. Madrigale always makes the same smooth reply to the diner: “Yes. That’s my service to you.”

The service, Mr. Madrigale added, also benefits customers in that it is a critical component of his education: “I don’t know if I would be a somm if I couldn’t taste wine. I want to learn. I want to know my wine list like the back of my hand.”
There wasn’t much to learn about the wine I ordered that night—Mr. Madrigale recom-mended the 2013 Pietracupa Greco di Tufo, an Italian white he knew well (and tasted, of course). A man at a neigh-boring table who was clearly a regular customer, however, gave Mr. Madrigale an excellent “education” when he ordered two very rare and expensive wines: the 1994 Chave Hermitage Blanc ($399) and the 1982 Château Lynch-Bages Bordeaux ($495), which Mr. Madrigale said were showing beautifully.

Some sommeliers, including Mr. Madrigale, told me they regard the exercise as similar to a chef’s tasting a dish before sending it out of the kitchen. It is an interesting if not altogether accurate analogy, since the wine isn’t made by the somm but simply purchased and cellared for a time.

There are plenty of sommeliers, though, who don’t embrace the pretasting ritual—for practical and philosophical reasons. Taylor Parsons, beverage director of République in Los Angeles, which is highly regarded for its wine list, said it doesn’t fit his restaurant’s casual style—or for that matter, Los Angeles’s wine service in general, which is more casual and perhaps a bit less “advanced” than that of other cities.

The practice isn’t common-place in Seattle either, according to Cortney Lease, company wine director of the Triple Door and Wild Ginger, one of the city’s most popular restaurants. Mrs. Lease doesn’t taste the wine before serving it because of the “considerable time” that the service entails. She also thinks her more knowledgeable customers might consider it unnecessary and be “uncomfortable with extra attention” as well.

I hadn’t heard extra attention cited as a negative by wine-drinking friends, but maybe that’s because attention is something New Yorkers don’t mind—or at least not as much as their more modest Seattle counterparts do. My friends’ chief concern was getting cheated out of wine.

I’ve actually witnessed the scenario friends such as Alan fear most. Some years ago I followed a group of sommeliers for a week to better understand the demands of the profession. These men worked at one of the top wine destinations in New York; they were rock stars who sold wines priced for rock stars. They tasted every bottle of wine they sold and sampled it at a hidden service station in the back of the room.

Whenever they opened a bottle of something worthy, they poured me a taste. I had some pretty amazing (and amazingly expensive) wines during my visit, and some of the pours were so generous, I was shocked that no diners protested.

Last week, I ran into one of those sommeliers, now the wine director of an even more famous New York restaurant, where he still tastes wines out of the customers’ sight, saying he “didn't want the guest to see me spit.”

I think drinkers who aren’t confident in their own judgment about a wine will likely be pleased by a sommelier’s service, while those who regard it as an intrusion might try a tactful refusal. Personally, I don’t mind if a sommelier tastes my wine if he or she is someone whose judgment or experience is equal to or greater than mine. In fact, I have a long list of men and women who are my Carfax sommeliers—but I prefer they do their tasting in full public view.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/asia