Rant: Best Way To Recommend Wines

When you write about wine or other alcoholic drinks, you'll often have people asking you for recommendations. You might receive an email request, or someone could contact you through social media seeking your advice. They might want to know what Uruguayan wine, Sherry or Sake they should try, being unfamiliar with the category. It's simple to provide a handful of recommendations, to give them a list of several choices, but that is probably not the best way to be helpful.

The problem is that even though the person might have a good list of recommendations, they might not be able to find those wines at their local shop. There are many thousands of different wines available and most wine shops only carry a few hundred or so. What are the chances they carry the specific wines you recommended? They might be able to order the wines through the shop, but that takes times and not every wine is available in every state. Your recommendations thus become relatively useless, failing to accomplish their purpose.

However, there is a better way to recommend wines, one which will work at any wine store across the country, though it requires a little effort on behalf of the requester.

I'm often asked for Sake recommendations and my response is usually the same. To ensure the requester can locate the Sake I recommend, I ask them to go to their local shop and take a picture of their Sake selection. Then, they email me that picture and I can tell them which of those Sakes I would recommend. That ensures they will be able to easily obtain the Sake I recommend, and won;t be disappointed by going to a store with one of my recommendations but not being able to find it. I've done this with different types of wines too, from Sherry to Port.

This may be the best way to recommend wines and other alcoholic drinks,,to ensure their availability to the requester. It is more helpful than just providing a list of different choices. More people need to be doing this, assisting those seeking wine recommendations. I actually haven't heard about many people doing this currently, but would like to hear more and more people doing it. With the holiday season in full swing, lots of people are seeking recommendations. Do them a service and help them select the wines that are most readily available to them.