“The worst situation is when people confuse dry and sweet,” Mr. Flosse said. “It happens quite often. They say, ‘I’d like to have a sweet wine.’ They don’t mean a dessert wine. So you have to describe exactly what you think they’re thinking, then you bring a wine, and they say, ‘I don’t like that.’ ”
His solution is to bring a sauvignon blanc, a chardonnay and a viognier and let them try. Their choice? “It’s almost always the chardonnay,” he said. “It’s not sweet. It’s a dry grape.”
Mr. Flosse is the wine director at A Voce, and this is, frankly, everything I hate about sommeliers in one quote. If you’re trying to describe your taste in white wine, and you’re not talking about dessert wines, and you use the word “sweet”, then I, for one, know what you mean, and what you mean is likely to be something in the general neighborhood of a California-style oaked Chardonnay. But Mr Flosse seems to be more interested in playing some weird kind of gotcha game, where he serves you three different dry white wines, you pick the sweetest of the three, and then he goes “that’s not sweet, it’s dry!” Ugh.