If your restaurant will be serving wine, you must take care to serve it properly. Wine served properly can enhance and optimize the taste and bouquet, while serving it improperly will cause your wine to taste differently, even badly.

Temperature

Most wines have a proper serving temperature for optimal taste. Light colored wines, including white wines, rosés and most sparkling wines will taste their best if served chilled at about 45 to 50 degrees. This temperature can be obtained by refrigerating the wine for about 1 - 2 hours before serving. Red wines are usually best served at a slightly cool room temperature, typically 60 to 65 degrees. Remember that on a hot day, all wines should be served slightly cooler than usual.

Chilling Wine

Your restaurant should have a proper ice bucket which allows you to fill it about 3/4 full of ice with some water. Place the wine in the bucket for 30 minutes before serving. Having the wine properly chilled will let your customers taste the wine at its best.

Glassware

The shape of the glass that wine is served in has an effect on the taste and bouquet of any wines you serve. Your restaurant should have the proper glassware for serving wines, this includes champagne glasses, flutes, rhines, port glasses, sherry glasses and all purpose wine glasses. White wine should be served in tulip shaped glasses. Red wine should be served in larger, rounded glasses with a nice size bowl. Sparkling wine and champagne should be served in tall and thin flute glasses.

Opening The Bottle

The server should use a high quality corkscrew to open the wine for the customer. There are several types of corkscrews, including the traditional, winged and screwpull. A restaurant should usually use a waiters corkscrew, made in stainless steel, it has a very sharp, serrated foil cutter with a thumb stud and a 5 turn steel spiral. Using the waiters corkscrew, remove the foil using the blade. Push the point of the corkscrew into the middle of the cork. Continue twisting the corkscrew until just one loop remains above the cork. Place the notch on top of the lever onto the lip of the wine bottle. Hold the tip of the lever against the bottle's lip, while using your other hand to stabilize the bottle, then slowly lift the lever to ease the cork out of the bottle about two thirds of the way. Grab the rest of the cork with your fingers and twist out. Use a napkin to wipe any wine from the bottle.