I choose restaurants as much by what they offer to drink as the food. Once you get to know a place I can see the house wine idea being useful if you like the wines offered and they match the food. Otherwise there is too much difference between wines to know what you are getting. A CA Chardonnay could be light and crisp or it could be overoaked. A French sauvignon blanc could be from Bordeaux, the Loire, or just be a vin de pays. Each of these would completely different in style and taste. EL, what was the price difference between the "house" wines and the other per glass selections? Were the producers and vintages of the "house" wines listed? Any description of the "house" wines? I read an interview with owner of a famous NY City restaurant and he stated if he was starting over again he would offer only a limited selection of "house" wines instead of building a huge and expensive cellar.

French merlot = Chateau Petrus.

Now that's a house wine I could get behind.

I agree that a well thought out limited wine selection is a good idea. The only down side is customers who are 'adventurous' and want the variety may feel shortchanged. In practice though, I think many restaurant owners are just not all that wine savvy and they will settle for the offerings that the distributors suggest with profit margin being the priority.

Is that a child drinking wine?

And it must be a couple glasses later, look how red her cheeks are! That usually happens to me if I have had a few too many of red.

meow meow meow

I think it's a case of rosacea.

Rosacea is not amusing.

DAMHIKT.

I'm with Hal, VoR on this one. My father suffered from Rosacea for many years, and I'm sure many people thought it was from hitting the bottle, but the truth is that he very seldom had a drink.

Who cares about the rosacea? I'm wondering whether that's evidence of a nose piercing in the photo, and, if so, whether the wine made her do it.

I can chime in on rosacea too. I have a pretty mild case of it. Every time I drink alcohol my cheeks turn bright red from it - even one glass of wine will do it. All my life I've had comments about my rosey cheeks or how drunk I must be (after my one glass of wine).

I apologize if I offended anyone, I seriously was referring to how my cheeks do get pretty red after a few glasses of wine.

Back off people. That girl is at Least 15.
IMHO, we should introduce responsible drinking to young people in the home, before they hit the BWW {big wide world} and discover, the hard {sometimes fatal} way, the effects of too much alcohol.
PS: has there been a cease-fire yet in the War on Adults? {I mean Drugs}.
Man, this nation is so dang immature.
Stepping off the Box, Now.

Last time I was at Petit Louis, they did offer a red house wine. The waiter brought it to our attention when we asked for some suggestions. I can't recall what it was, but all our guests enjoyed it.

I didn't make the comment about rosacea to be amusing. I know many people who have that condition to various extents and the picture made me suggest the condition rather than the over imbibing.

A sign of the times--even Lettie Teague, the wine columnist for Food & Wine, has a piece in the March issue on ordering the cheapest wines from the wine list. My favorite comment in the article was from Joe Bastianich, who said his cheapest wines go for $28. How did he arrive at that figure? "It just feels right." Maybe to you, Joe ...

Dahlink, maybe it's cause Joe Bastianich is in NYC? I mean a can of coke there is like five bucks, so maybe there's the NY inflation factor on top of the (usual) ridiculous mark up for wine factor.