[wine] Thurs. night

FYI/FYE March 3, 1999 A Sommelier's Little Secret: The Microwave By WILLIAM GRIMES A NEW question is creeping into wine service in New York: How do you want that cooked? For many years, Americans have confounded the rest of the world by drinking their white wines too cold and their red wines too warm. Sommeliers no longer hesitate when diners ask that a luscious Corton-Charlemagne be plunged into an ice bucket. They just do it. It's easy. Red wine poses a different problem, since it often arrives at the table with a slight chill. If the diners want their wine the temperature of a blood transfusion, and fast, the sommelier must resort to wiles, and the wiliest wile of all, it turns out, is the microwave oven. Sometimes it's the customer who wants his wine 'waved. Sometimes it's the hard-pressed sommelier who makes the decision to go nuclear. But it happens. There really are wines that go into that silent chamber at 58 degrees and come out, like a client at a tanning salon, flush with radiation and 7 to 10 degrees warmer. ''There is no way any sommelier is going to admit to doing it,'' said Dan Perlman, the wine director at Veritas. ''They'll say, 'I've heard of it,' like I just did. I'm in the clear, though, because we don't have a microwave.'' The practice is by no means widespread, or even widely known, but it is something that happens at even the top restaurants. Alexis Ganter, the wine director at City Wine and Cigar, reacted with stunned silence when informed about the microwave trick. Then he let out a long, shuddering sigh and moaned, ''Oh my God.'' Like other members of the ''wine is a living thing'' school, Mr. Ganter expressed deep fear of this new technological breakthrough. Others showed a native American willingness to at least experiment. ''It makes sense,'' said Ralph Hersom, the wine director at Le Cirque 2000. ''I don't see that it would harm a wine, but I'd recommend doing it with a younger wine.'' Still others fessed up, some expressing shame but others not. ''I did it once when I was working at a wine bar in Madison, Wis.,'' said Eric Zillier, the wine director at the Hudson River Club. ''It was an '85 Burgundy from Verget, one of my favorites, but I made the customer, who was very insistent, swear he would never tell anyone I did it.'' Christopher Cannon, at the Judson Grill, has used the microwave and doesn't mind saying so. It's a method of last resort, but it is a method that works, and he will use it. ''I zap it for 5 to 10 seconds,'' he said. It seems more reasonable than the customer who wanted his Gaja barbaresco served with ice cubes. And why not? Most Champagne houses turn their bottles by machine, not hand. The plastic cork and the screw top work just as well, if not better, than a cork. So why resist the microwave? ''The microwaves are heating the water, which is the main constituent of wine,'' said Christian E. Butzke, an enologist at the University of California at Davis. ''If you do that for a very brief period -- 10 seconds maximum -- no other chemical reactions are going to take place, and nothing will be destroyed.'' The phenolic structure of the wine, Mr. Butzke said, should not be disturbed by the microwaves. ''It is awkward,'' he admitted, ''because you associate a microwave with TV dinners.'' Wine makers, somewhat surprisingly, do not run screaming from the room at the idea. ''It's not something I'd do with a fine wine,'' said Richard Draper, the wine maker at Ridge Vineyards, ''but if it's an industrial product, which 90 percent of wine is, it's been through a lot worse already.'' As for fine wines, Mr. Draper said that his objection to microwaving was philosophical rather than rational. Some wine lovers even see magical powers in the microwave. Richard Dean, the sommelier at the Mark Hotel, used to serve a wine club that gathered once a month at the Honolulu hotel where he worked. The members were convinced that warming a red wine in the microwave for five seconds put an extra five years of age on the wine. A professional to the tips of his fingers, Mr. Dean did not laugh. He did not argue. Nor did he tell his customers that the hotel had no microwave. He simply disappeared with the wine, reappeared after a decent interval, served it, and everyone was happy -- until a rival hotel snitched on him. ''That was embarrassing,'' he said. The same sommeliers who shrink before the microwave do not mind employing all sorts of nontechnological tricks, like running a decanter under warm water before pouring the wine in it, replacing glasses on the table with glasses that have just come out of the dishwasher, or even putting the bottle in the dishwasher. Joseph Funghini, the wine director at the Post House, said that he has wrapped a bottle in a warm towel. Others plunge the bottle into a bucket of warm water. Nearly every restaurant, bending to American preferences, has raised the storage temperature from classic cellar temperature, which is 55 degrees, to about 60 degrees. (Wines in long-term storage remain at 53 degrees to 55 degrees, with a humidity of 70 percent.) ''Ninety-five percent of customers will object to 55 degrees,'' Mr. Hersom of Le Cirque said. Some object to 75 degrees. ''I had a customer, very sophisticated, who simply liked to drink red wine at body temperature,'' said Mr. Perlman of Veritas. ''He asked that it be decanted and then placed on a shelf above the stove.'' Mr. Perlman has a lot of stories like that. There's the customer who wanted the Champagne decanted, to get rid of those annoying bubbles, and the one who wanted to add fruit juice to his Mouton-Rothschild to make a sangria. Mr. Perlman suggested a more modest red. The customer said no. He wanted a good sangria. The microwave, however, seems to be the philosophical point of no return. Some sommeliers simply cannot cross the threshold. ''You're destroying everything in the wine that makes it wine,'' Mr. Zillier of the Hudson River Club said. ''It's catastrophic.'' When informed of Mr. Butzke's line of argument, he dug in his heels. ''Instinct tells me the fragile biochemical ingredients are going to be affected by the highly excited water molecules,'' he said. ''You're cooking it. If you put wine in a saute pan to bring the temperature up, people would laugh at you. What's the difference?'' Convenience, for one thing. Efficiency for another. And one thing more. ''You get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, but you do these things,'' Mr. Perlman said. ''After all, the customer is paying for the bottle of wine.'' Now for the Gory Details: How to Nuke a Wine THERE is a very simple way to bring a chilled wine up a few degrees in temperature. Let it sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. This technique, known to the ancients, produces spectacular results with minimal effort. But there are times when the harried host does not have 15 minutes. That's where the microwave comes in, for those with the nerve to put a cherished bottle on the hot seat. The microwave moment presents itself more frequently than one might think. True, most people do not have wine cellars, and therefore their wine is more likely to need chilling than warming. They do, however, have refrigerators. The red wine that was left to cool off a bit can come out cold, and white wine is almost certainly well below cellar temperature after several hours on the shelf. This is not a good thing. Cold helps mask the deficiencies of a white wine, accentuating its crispness and thirst-quenching properties, but it kills