I was dining the other night with a colleague, enjoying a respectable Russian River Pinot Noir, when he said with a steely firmness: "We'll pour our own wine, thank you."
This declaration of independence was prompted by that quintessential New York restaurant phenomenon: a server reducing a bottle of wine to a seven-minute, four-glass experience through overfilling and topping-up of a fanaticism found rarely outside the Middle East.
I know I'm being elitist here, a terrible thing in this political season, and quite possibly nobody in small-town Pennsylvania gives a damn how wine is poured. But I don't care and, come to think of it, last time I was in small-town Pennsylvania – at Gettysburg – I drank rather well.
