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Order the Second-Cheapest Wine on the List? Testing the Theory on North Carolina's Outer Banks

Posted 08/06/2008 at 05:37 AM by Cathy

There's an idea going around about ordering the second cheapest wine on a restaurant's wine list. It's good enough to be on the list, but you don't need to suffer the restaurant's mark-up to quite the extreme, quantitatively speaking, as a higher-priced bottle.

We put that theory to the test tonight at Nicoletta's Italian Café in Corolla, on North Carolina's Outer Banks. We ordered a bottle of Mastroberadino Radici for $29, partly because we'd never even heard of the wine or the grape or the producer, and partly because the description of the wine was too hard to resist.

"Delicious cherry fruit with spicy characteristics."

Doesn't sound like much, but this was a bottle on the white wine list and, well, who wouldn't be intrigued by the thought of cherry fruit in white wine? Add some spice and I'm hooked, at least for the trial stage.

The wine turned out to be a 2006 Fiano di Avellino and it was, indeed, shockingly spicy from the mid-palate all the way to the finish. "Shockingly" not so much in the blow-me-over kind of way, but more in the "How-did-they-do-that?" kind of way, meaning how did they get that kind of spice into that bottle of wine?

It was spicy the way a holiday-season kitchen is spicy after your traditional grandmother has been baking Snickerdoodles and slow-roasting ham all day. That is not to say the spice was homey – if you're lucky you've got a traditional grandmother only in the sense that she knows the traditional cooking rules just well enough to break them to shockingly pleasant effect. So you've got cinnamon but it's an assertive, pungent cinnamon, playing the lead role rather than the supporting actor. And you've got star anise but it's a star anise whose essence has been extracted, mellowed yet intensified, after four or five hours' roasting, plucked in a just-so pattern in the face-up side of the ham.

The spice in the wine itself mellowed a level or two, from shocking to stunning, after a few sips and, once our meals arrived (Pollo Antonio with prosciutto and mozzarella) the beauty faded. A food-friendly wine it was not, at least not in relation the food we chose for the evening.

Which was too bad. But the silver lining? Just as in Massachusetts, in North Carolina you can carry out the wine you haven't drunk from your bottle.

Which makes for a lovely, spicy nightcap.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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