The World’s Priciest Rinse Cycle

Most dedicated wine lovers would have been aghast: The tuxedoed waiter behind the pouring table was rinsing out wine glasses with $100 bottles of wine!

There we were at the grand tasting of the winners of this year’s Tre Bicchieri (Three Glasses) award, presented by the respected wine magazine Gambero Rosso, and things couldn’t have been more Italian. Tre Bicchieri is the highest honor an Italian wine can attain, and to highlight these choices, a tasting of all 116 was set up for attendees at the Slow Food Salone del Gusto, which took place a few weeks ago in Torino. Daniele Cernilli, Gambero Rosso’s senior editor and chief judge, with a staff of 85, spent more than a year evaluating some 8,000 Italian wines to arrive at the final tally of winners.

Coinciding with the final day of the five-day Salone, the grand tasting cost $50 a person and differed from those in the United States in a number of ways. The most obvious was the way tasters’ wine glasses were rinsed. Sommeliers doing the pouring used the classic method: with the wine to be sampled. This is not unusual with inexpensive wine, but when the wine to be sampled is 1995 Solaia of Antinori, which retails for about $90 a bottle, the effect is staggering. Literally hundreds of dollars worth of fine wine was poured into dump buckets, having been used only to rinse glasses.

Other differences from U.S. tastings: Most tasters wore suits; smoking wasn’t prohibited, so the room quickly filled with a fog of smoke; and tables were jammed as people shoved one another aside to get the last few drops of some rare wines.

The biggest difference, however, was in the typical response of Italians to white wine. Some 90% of the wine consumed in Italy is red, and the white wine tables were all but ignored. A Chardonnay lover would have been overjoyed.