Photo from BravoTV.com

While watching my guilty-pleasure reality show Top Chef last night, I was flabbergasted that the chefs chose to forgo serving wine with an Italian dinner. Although the decision was a budget issue, I feel that they could have changed their menu around to make room in the budget for a few inexpensive and delicious wines.

Some background on the show
Top Chef is a reality show on Bravo featuring 15 young chefs all vying for the title of Top Chef, along with a variety of prizes: money, equipment, and publicity. Each episode features a “Quick-Fire” challenge and an elimination challenge. Winning the Quick-Fire gives you immunity for the elimination challenge, in which one chef is sent away to pack their knives and go home.

About Wednesday’s episode
This week’s clever competition required the chefs to split into two teams and conceptualize, design, and open a restaurant in less than 2 days. The chefs were each given half of a semi-furnished restaurant space and were given full creative license to conceive of a theme and menu for their space and then execute it. Their budget of $1,700 needed to accommodate 24 diners and allotted $700 for interior design, $500 for serving ware and $500 for food.

While one team went the “Upscale Diner” route with burgers, chicken wings, beer and floats, the other team chose to do “Rustic Italian” fare – except they omitted one crucial component of Italian cuisine: WINE. This error soon became obvious to them when every diner was asking, “Where’s the wine list” or “They could have at least had one red and one white wine.”

My thoughts on this error are split. First, I know what it’s like to not have a lot of dough for dinner, and when this happens, the alcohol is usually the easiest thing to cut out. On the other side, they would only have needed 6 bottles of wine (or 3 bottles each of red and white) to serve their 24 guests, if you assume one 750ml bottle of wine has about 5 5-oz. servings. If they were savvy with their selections, they could have easily found 6 nice $10 bottles – and $60 is not a huge chunk of their budget to be devoting to such a worthy ingredient to an Italian meal. So what good, inexpensive wines could they have selected?

Here are two Tuscan wines which would have been excellent selections:

• Col di Sasso 2004: Castello Banfi’s “Super Tuscan” – with Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese. At $10 a bottle, it’s a great table wine to serve with your Italian supper. Notable flavors are red berries and some chocolate. This would have gone well with their first course of grilled meatball, as well as their dessert, that included Gorgonzola.
• Antinori Orvieto Classico 2004: From the Antinori Winery in Tuscany, this Orvieto has a light straw color and fruity nose. This would have paired well with their second dish of Parsley pesto and mushrooms, as well as the creamy polenta served alongside the main course of roasted pork loin.

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Now a question for our readers: Has anyone else ever asked themselves “Wine: to be or not to be?”