They are available... you may have to special order them, but its not impossible if you have the right Wine Merchant. Most big name Chateaus will have odd-sized bottlings... Im quite sure Mouton and Lafite do them every vintage. Check with your merchant for details.

Well... if you endorse them then that is saying a lot... but, IMHO if I were you and you were in the market for some of the high-end wines by the glass at this place, it would be interesting for the Sommeliere to explain (in detail) what their SOP regarding high-end juice by the glass is... and I reiterate, in detail...

In my book, no high-end and/or full service place should be caught dead with an opened bottle that is longer than 12 hours old** - no matter how sophisticated any vacuum or inert gas preservation system is.

(**) unless this is part of a very specific double-decant scheme, etc. etc.

12 hours old? you mean left open for 12 hours?

first time i had grange was out of an enomatic. amazing stuff, and bottle later was basically the same. but im no expert.

I can add a +1 to this recommendation, that place is very interesting and a great way to pass some time in HEL.

Gaucho,

If I were Berns bound, and not buying a bottle of wine with dinner, you know me well enough to know that I would ask for a new bottle to be opened for my 3 oz pour.

let us presuming the wine is ready upon opening and decanting. i would really like to have a group of "distinguished" experts blind taste fresh opened and say 2 day old inert gas preserved.

i think bern's offers about 100 wines by the glass. only a couple get over $35 shelf price. i see no first or second bordeaux, few top CA cabs, and only 1 or 2 wines that would be hard to find. even those hard to find (the 70 pauillac) i could easily find a few acceptable substitutes in my cellar.

a few years back, i went to harry's bar in paris. they had opened a hermitage and cote roti. also had two firsts open. i think lafite and latour. they were sort of the high end wines of the day(it was lunch time)

When we went to Montalcino, the local bars would ask us what we wanted opened next after one of the bottles ran out. they had about 3 or 4 brunello open at a time. the "castle" must have had 50 or so open, and would provide a tasting of each distinct micro area of brunello. i could not tell the difference.

in bologna, there enoteca Marsalla will have about 15 premium reds from pretty much everywhere in italy open for by the glass. when you drink the number of open bottles down to 10, they will open anything you request(from italy).

Lovely examples, and I dont dispute that many places do this.... still, that does not mean that the practice is 'best practice'. And yes, I can assure you that someone with the right palate will tell the difference.

Someone with a very 'basic' palate and relatively little experience (ie. my own) can tell this more often than not (yes, Ive been know to miss a few)...

Not to brag, but I would never dare lead a tasting event using opened bottles... in my book, its a huge faux-pas to not have a new bottle opened for each new tasting, its a matter of proper etiquette. But... as the saying goes, to each his own... ^

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D050; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448)

lets get back to top wines....

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Well... Mine are all @ another FTers house...

And not too impressive, but I'm happy with them- picked up in WA @ SEADOO

Ah... so how much does offsite storage at a FTers place of abode run you per month...????

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9000/4.6.0.167 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

Well I hope not too many bottles

Now that I thought @ it... they might be @ more then one FTer's place...

I've taken some Rosemount Mountain Blue (2000) shiraz to FTers from my cellar; to someone staying at the Sheraton in Sydney and also to the kaukaus when we were in the Hawaii Prince, along with them, for our dinner in Honolulu. ^

I'll bring some to our dinner this Friday with some other Hawaiians, due here any time now. Wine is meant to be enjoyed with friends and I'm happy to crack open a bottle for these visits.

We've cellared these at home for maybe 5yrs, so it's good timing to enjoy our '00 vintage.

Some also made it to BEY, hopefully, from a dinner a few years ago, too.

I disagree with this. IMHO, young top-tier ageworthy wines that are put on an inert gas preservation system improve for at least 2-3 days, and often as long as 4-5 days if the wine really needed to be open for a few hours to open up. Obviously, if a we're talking with a wine with 10-20 years of bottle age on it, drinking it sooner is better, but most better restaurant wine lists are full of things like 4-5 year old red Bordeaux and recent vintages of California Cabs or Burgundies, or similar quality stuff from other places - but it's mostly current releases - and all of these wines could use a bit of exposure to air. If I'm drinking a 5 year old classified growth Bordeaux, or a 3-4 year old California Cabernet or Argentine Malbec, or Aussie Shiraz, I'd prefer to drink it after it was on a gas system for 2 days, as opposed to 2 hours. It would certainly be nice to know about how long it had been opened if that info was available - but my issue with most restaurant wine lists, particularly those laden with top-notch reds, is that the wines are served too young, and without enough airing. Putting a bottle on an inert gas system that might last 2-5 days in a typical restaurant setting when served by the glass actually improves this situation - sometimes noticeably.

I think Bern's has the largest wine list in the country. 500,000 bottles I believe is their rough estimate.