None wine drinkers in France
 

We know it is the custom for wine to be served at all meals in Paris. What if diners are non drinkers, does the restaurant reduce the cost of the wine? What protocol do some people follow in light of the established custom of automatically serving wine at a meal?

No one just assumes you drink wine, you have to order it. My parents don't drink wine and they got through Paris and Italy just fine. You sit down and order what you want.

In restaurants it is the custom for wine to be offered, not forced upon you. Generally speaking, if you don't order it you won't get any.
There are occasionally, fixed-price menus that include a pitcher of house wine. You don't have to drink it, and you can ask that they not bring it, but in that case refusing it won't reduce the cost of your meal.
If you are offered a wine list, simply decline it.

Come on you guys, this has to be a troll post.

Troll or not, I'm going to dinner with him :) Ahhh, wines...

Wine... "offered"? I have never seen this in two dozen trips to Europe.

I <i>order</i> it.

Best wishes,

Rex

&lt;custom for wine to be served at all meals in Paris&gt; well that is simply not true. i don't know where you're getting your information but it is incorrect.

In a restaurant you will not get wine unless you order wine. If a glass is perhaps included on a fixed-price menu, for example, no they will not lower the cost of the meal (which I assume is what you mean even though you said &quot;reduce the cost of the wine&quot;. You would simply say &quot;no thank you&quot; or don't drink it.

Nobody is &quot;automatically serving wine at a meal&quot; so there is no protocol established.

Stats i've seen indicate that less than 50% of French now drink wine routinely. I know from my in-laws very few drink wine other than a glass at Sunday dinner - never any other time - so i don't think it's an issue in France though i'm sure in restaurants my in-laws and other non-imbibers may take a small swig of wine as a de rigeuer part of the meal.

In October 2004, picky, the OP, posted a response to someone else's Spain question, and in the response, picky said he/she had been in 20 countries in Europe.

And nowhere was wine offered?

I've never been in any restaurant in France where they automatically serve you wine -- you have to order it.

I don't understand the question of a restaurant reducing the cost of wine if you are a nondrinker. If you don't want it, don't order it. If you do order it, they aren't going to reduce the cost if you say you are ordering it but are a nondrinker.

The only place in France I've ever sat down and automatically been &quot;served&quot; wine was in a truck stop - routier - place along a truck route, where they assume the routiers will be wanting a bottle of wine with their mid-day meal, and this is a custom that is fast disappearing.

picky, if you've been to 20 European countries and this is still an issue for you, that's weird.

You don't have to drink wine in France -there are lots of other options (though for me personally wine = France).

You'll never be served it automatically as you claim the custom is, except as I mentioned at certain truck stop places which are pretty quickly becoming obsolete, and even there if you didn't drink the wine you wouldn't be charged for it.

At restaurants, you're given a wine list, from which you choose wine, just like here in the USA. There's no issue with &quot;reducing the cost of the wine.&quot; You order wine, or you don't. End of story.

Where did you get this ridiculous notion that wine is &quot;automatically&quot; served with a meal, and what wine did you think was &quot;automatically&quot; ordered? Did you think the customer had no choice? Did you think you had to pay for it whether you drank it or not?

Silly!

I know some people that would be extremely grateful if they knew that a place where they don't have to ask for wine exists !

picky with all the information you've posted here about the many countries and places you've visited, including previous trips to France, I'm trying to figure out what you did before when there? And where did you ever see wine come automatically with any meal?

In older tour guides, notably Sandra Gustafson's &quot;Cheap Eats&quot;, restaurant prices were listed as including or not including wine.

However, over ten years, we've seen nearly no menus with &quot;wine included&quot;, except those with a prix fixe menus where one is offered &quot;with&quot;, usually course by course, and another &quot;without&quot; wine.

My husband and I do not care for wine. In fact, we prefer a Scotch as an &quot;apertif&quot; sometimes - something many of the tour/restaurant guides specifically suggest is not &quot;the done thing&quot; before dinner, and only a &quot;single malt Scotch&quot; is appropriate after dinner (of no importance to us).

Sometimes, we have drinks with dinner; other times we don't. This has never been an issue anywhere we've ever dined in Paris.

If we've ordered a Scotch before dinner - when the waiter inquires about wine, we just say that Johnny Walker Black is our favorite wine, which is responded to with amusement and apparent understanding. If we don't feel like drinking with dinner that evening, we just politely decline wine. Never a problem.

I did say &quot;nearly never&quot;. For the first time, this last trip, we patronized a (fabulous) restaurant where the prix fixe menu included a bottle of red or white wine. Just so you know, they brought it anyway (&quot;because it's included&quot;) and poured it into our glasses as well. The price was exceptionally reasonable for wonderful the food, and we didn't care about the wine (especially at lunch time, for us). We did find it a bit festive (for us), and took a tiny bit of a sip or two.

I would guess, should you order a &quot;wine included&quot; meal, the same thing would happen to you.