Bring Your Own Wine has taken off slowly in Ontario. After six months, there are fewer than 200 BYO restaurants in the province, and about 20 Ottawa restaurants allow you to BYO, with corkage fees from $5 to $25 (list at www.bringmywine.ca).
So restaurant wine lists are still important but, as I eat out in Ottawa, I'm frequently disappointed by the wines on offer. Too often they seem selected to fight with the menu, rather than complement it, and in many cases it's obvious that restaurant owners have had a wine agent do the list.
Agents are happy to oblige, of course, because they can pack lists with their own wines. I wonder if these restaurateurs let their food-suppliers decide their menus, too? With wine often accounting for as much as half their bill, diners should be insulted by this careless approach.
I'm especially dismayed by wine lists in many Asian restaurants. It could be that most diners at Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants prefer beer. But I know I sometimes choose beer because, with a few exceptions (like Hot Peppers and Mekong, both on Somerset Street) the wine lists are awful. There are excellent wine and Asian food matches, and a wine professional can easily put together a short, smart list.
Lack of care with wine takes many forms. Some of Ottawa's best-known restaurants have lists full of errors in spelling and appellations, and some omit vintages. But on a positive note, many Ottawa restaurants are doing good things on the wine side, and I'll be writing about them now and again.
One I've visited several times recently is Black Cat Cafe, 93 Murray St., which offers a short but varied and, above all, innovative menu, and where I find the quality consistently excellent.
Algonquin College sommelier graduate Remy Urquhart's 60-item wine list looks short because it covers one sheet of paper, and he manages that by not bothering with tasting notes.
Remy and owner Richard Urquhart compensate by being (in my experience) faultless in recommending wines that go with your food choices.
Recently, a friend and I ate at Black Cat and shared a bottle of Villiera "Down to Earth" 2003, a South African wine that's an unusual blend of Shiraz, Merlot, Gamay, Pinotage, Carignan and Touriga Nacional grape varieties. It had distinct sweet fruit, with spicy and smoky notes, and we paired it with an appetizer of garlic bread with lardons, melted bocconcini and a balsamic reduction. What a match! And it was great with the rack of Australian lamb.
The Black Cat wine list is mainly New World, with concentrations in Australia, South Africa and California, but it draws from Europe, too. Its main weakness is the near-absence of Canadian wines, but it's otherwise eclectic and intelligent, and it features many less-appreciated varieties and blends from small wineries. There's a fairly steady turn-over, so the Black Cat's wine list is constantly changing, which I appreciate.
If you're a wine-lover who's happy to try something new and different, try this next time you're looking for a food and wine experience.