Need an analogy about wine...
 

Ok, I work in a bar that has a pretty decent wine list. However, one kind of wine we don't offer is white zinfandel.

We are a somewhat elegant establishment and try to reflect that with our wine list, decor, food offerings, and live entertainment, but I'm getting away from myself.
As I see it, in my opinion, White zinfandel is cheap, common and not very sophisticated. Elementary, so to speak.

What I need is an analogy, (or is it a metaphor? Whatever.) to describe white zinfandel, to let the person ordering it know that they could be doing so much better, without insulting them outright.

A funny example of when this would have been perfect, One time this older guy came in and start expounding about how kids today have no culture, this that the other, all videogames, no books, yadda yadda yadda, and how everyone should be trying to expand their horizons, and then proceeds to order a white zin.
Talk about irony. But anyway...

So I want to be able to say is something like this;
White zinfandel is like "________"
or White zinfandel is to wine what "________" is to "________."
or If WZ were a _______ it would be a _______."
Something to convey it's, for lack of a better term, simplicity.

So far I've come up withthe following;
WZ is like considering McDonalds to be Gourmet cuisine.
If WZ were a magazine, it would be "Highlights for Children"
WZ is to wine what The peoples choice awards are to Awards ceremonys.

As you can see, I'm struggling to come up with some quality comparisons.

If wine were Christmas gifts, white zin would be chia pets.
If wine were TV shows, white zin would be Jerry Springer.
If wine were porn, white zin would be Girls Gone Wild.
If wine were music, white zin would be boy bands.
If wine were rental cars, white zin would be "Not exactly."
If wine were Presidents, white zin would be George W. Bush (Forget that one - it works better for MD 20-20)
If wine were SNL actors. white zin would be Horatio Sanz
If wine were singers, white zin would be William Hung
If wine were the World Series, white zin would be the Red Sox
If wine were cars, white zin would be a Yugo.
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.
.
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.Okay - so they're somewhat subjective - at least it's something you can run with.

tell ya what. run to your local grocery store and grab a few of those boxes of wine. carfully remove the silvery spacebag contained within, spout intact, and when someone orders the white zin, bring their glass to the table and ceremoniously pour it out of the spout on the spacebag.

do this a few times and people might catch the hint.

My wife and I call white zin a "starter wine". It is usually the first kind of wine someone drinks, and later, as their tastes adjust, they can move on to wines with less sweetness. Kind of like the shallow end of the pool.

Basically, it is a wine cooler without the carbination.

You could modify one of my favorite analogies: "Kenny G is to jazz as sugar is to soup".

I ordered one one for a guest tonight and the bartender replied, "Kool-Aid, eh?"

I don't think that you are going to win. Lock onto an aspect of the wine and refer them to another product.

Ex. "I'm afraid that we don't carry Montivina White Zinfandel, but if you are looking for something sweet - May I recomend . . . "

It's shakey ground to question the quality of a guest's selsections. Play on positive notes.

Good luck resturant industry comrade.

:lol:
and if someone actually orders another glass, you should offer them the cardboard box that once housed the silver goon-bag as a reward.
they could wear it like a dunces hat for the rest of the evening.

I think that any answer you give as an analogy is going to come off sounding trite and insulting. I think the right answer is to state that the chef and the sommelier make an attempt to match the wine list to the cuisine and they have found that those looking for a sweeter white wine would prefer a reisling or a gerwurtztraminer. They get what they are looking for and you get to earn a larger tip by making the right match with their meal.

Our guests tend to find that a glass of [something else] complements our cuisine far better than a simple glass of Zinfandel would. I think that you would be pleasantly surprised by the superior quality of one of the selecitons that has earned its place on our wine menu by keeping true to our tradition of serving nothing but the best, as that is the least our customers deserve.

If you wrap it in enough elegant-sounding spech, even an insult to their sub-par taste sounds like a compliment. You may want to tone down the verbosity of the bullshit, although I would drop it on them until they asphyxiated.

I would say something like, "If this bar were a car dealership, the wines we sell here would be BMWs. And White Zin is a kind of Honda Civic wine. So we don't carry White Zin, but we do have some reasonably priced wine by the glass that I think you'd be very impressed with...."

WZ:Wine :: PBR:Beer