"I use this three to four times a day," he said, as he dropped off a colleague in front of a wine bar in the German capital's Mitte district on a recent Sunday evening.
The problem comes down to the mechanics of a system known as en primeur – effectively a kind of futures trading where customers commit to paying up front for a wine on the strength of tasting an unfinished sample, receiving the bottled wine a couple of years later.
Mothers pushing strollers window shop past Lululemon along Frankford Avenue's buzzing retail corridor fronted with wine bars, coffee shops, couture boutiques, yoga studios, a vintage motorcycle joint, and an Argentinian tango dance school.
Pulling into the parking lot, I was greeted with a dreary sign of winter: fronting each parking spot was a wine barrel filled with ornamental cabbages, a cliché of the cold.
Brick and stone walls and arches over the bar and front lounge suggest, appropriately, a wine cellar.
Chronic Cellars' Josh Beckett is a surfer whose fun-loving attitude translates into funky labels and goofy names fronting some very serious wine.
La Cuvée, a wine bar and bistro specializing in light French fare and Long Island wines, opened at 326 Front Street in Greenport (631-477-0066) in October.
A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94. "I think there are individual expert tasters with exceptional abilities sitting alone who have a good sense, but when you sit 100 wines in front of them the task is beyond human ability," he says.
Sure you could choose a wine by the glass from any of the 40 on offer through the Enomatic wine dispensers in the front room.
There is a small bar up front, serving wine but no spirits.
