It’s seriously too bad that French Wine Week, as celebrated around the world by Sofitel, the French hotel chain, happened in the middle of the Fall TV Season Premiere Week. With up to four shows premiering a night for two solid weeks, let’s just say Anne really needed a happy hour break. So when we were invited to the newly renovated Riviera 31 bar at Sofitel Los Angeles (just across the Beverly Center on Beverly Boulevard) by the bar’s management, we went. Happily. It’s just that Anne was too busy writing reviews during that time to report back here.
But we had a lovely, lovely time and were reminded of a significant lesson in the world of wine.
The nice folks at Riviera 31 are working on making this quite the destination for a fun post-work drink and/or evening out. The bar, which has been newly renovated and is quite plush, with lots of comfy chairs and sofas, is featuring live entertainment most nights of the week. They have a special hors-d’oeuvres menu, including some lovely short rib sliders, for $8, and a dish of olives with pitas for $3. The wines are still running between $6 to $12 a glass.
Now, wine snobs will tell you that the last thing you want to do is buy wine by the glass, and in many cases, we’d have to agree. See, the problem is that once a bottle is opened, oxygen gets into it and starts reacting with the wine. When it’s the bottle you’ve just opened to go with your dinner, this is a good thing. All those nice smells called “The Nose” start floating into all that oxygen and you smell it as you drink and it’s yummy. It’s just not so yummy when all those smells have dissipated after hours and hours of being open and now the oxygen is reacting with the other flavor elements in the wine and it starts tasting all pruney and sweet and off. This is often what happens, mostly to red wines, at bars where they don’t know how to take care of their wines and aren’t selling a lot of it.
But at bars and restaurants where wine is a major feature and they’re obviously selling a lot of it, it’s a lot safer to buy wine by the glass. And bars, like Riviera 31, do know how to protect their open reds by either gassing them or vacuum-sealing them. Or they’re selling so much of it, the bottles don’t have a chance to sit around open for hours and hours. Whites don’t tend to react with oxygen quite as quickly as reds do, so keeping an open bottle in the fridge for a night or two isn’t going to hurt it as much.
So if you’re out and don’t want to buy a whole bottle, say you’re just at a pit stop before going to the theatre or after, and you don’t really want a cocktail, and you’re not at a place where wine is a priority, you’re safest buying either the house white or house red. That’s the wine the place is selling the most of, which means there’s less of it hanging around open. You could ask the waitstaff or bartender when the red was last opened. If said person doesn’t know, pass.
The other thing to note about Riviera 31, is that the managers really want to make this a preferred pit stop. Yes, it’s in the high rent part of L.A., and parking will set you back $12 for the evening. But all in all, it’s not that expensive for an evening out when you just want a nibble and a nice glass of wine. And one of the groups we saw the night we were there – Paris Chansons – will be back on November 12. They were really a lot of fun, including some darned good music that wasn’t too loud. While live entertainment can be lots of fun, for us, we tend to want quiet when we go out. The good news is that the bar does have a few quieter spots in the back corners where you can have a conversation.
So while the management was sponsoring the party we were at, we will be back – maybe to hear Paris Chansons. After all, a good bit of wine by the glass is a lovely thing.