I had to respond to a critical review of our wine bar last week mentioning that we didn’t have a “great selection” of wines by-the-glass. This is essentially what I wrote, but I thought it worthwhile to talk about in this column for education’s sake: Any establishment that has more than 20 bottles of wine by-the-glass is playing games to be able to make money on those wines and to get them into your glass. The only problem is, they likely don’t care about “when” those wines hit your glass — only that they eventually will. And, many of them, or most, if we’re being honest, don’t give a darn about “how” those wines show once they hit your glass. Heck, one of my peers once served me a glass of pinot on a Tuesday that was opened on Thursday. When I asked the owner — not a server — to smell the wine, he couldn’t tell that the wine was oxidized beyond enjoyment. That place is long since out of business, by the way. Many of these places will very gently put the cork in the bottle, with about 2/3 of the cork still outside the bottle, and simply leave them on the counter over night(s) until they sell. Some may stick those bottles in the refrigerator, bringing them out every day in hopes of selling them (warm/cold/warm/cold). Some still have paid tens of thousands of dollars for machines that continuously pump inert gas into the bottles to ward off oxygen, enemy No. 1 of wine. They’re trying to steal another day of use at your expense. It doesn’t even have to be a place with 20-plus wines on the menu. It could be your favorite corner bar with six wines on the menu to satisfy the occasional customer who doesn’t want a car bomb or a pint of Blue Moon. There’s a place in East Village that I love, but I’d never order wine there — they keep all of it in a commercial fridge at 38 degrees! In any case, if you’re not going to sell the wines the day you open them, and they’re truly not going to hold up until day No. 2 (which the vast majority won’t), then these establishments are either selling you wine that is already “gone” or they are selling you wines that are not showing the way the winemaker or Mother Nature intended for you to taste them. In the case of the latter, think about it. The wine is aged in barrel/bottle (likely) in a controlled fashion until ready for release. The enclosure type (cork, screw cap, etc.) has a pretty predictable role in the aging of the wine. Once you open a wine, it begins a pretty quick degradation into oxidized grape juice (not even vinegar, even though that sounds romantic). You can slow that down by keeping oxygen, light and heat away from it, but at this point, it becomes something different than what the winemaker wanted to show you. Those wine bars popping up with machines are showing you these types of wines: wines with a bit of softening from initial open, then you not only are not getting the freshest just-out-of-the-bottle flavors (because oxygen has softened the flavors between the time the enclosure is opened and the time the inert gas starts pumping into the sealed bottle), but you are getting an almost “mummified” version of that wine with no predictable aging, but rather, kind of a state of suspended youth, in a place somewhere between “fresh” and “dead.” I believe that having a glass or bottle of wine is a journey that you take. It’s an implicit contract of sorts, between you and Mother Nature. When you start to prolong the life of a bottle of wine, you start to see different things — most likely not intended — than you would if you simply open a bottle, have four glasses and then recycle the bottle. Remember that Stephen King novel called “Pet Cemetery?” If you don’t, the theme was that if your pet (or friend) dies, you could take them to this special cemetery and they’d come back to life, only slightly different. In the novel, they become homicidal. I’m not saying these wines will try to kill you, but why take the chance? That is why we don’t have more than 15 wines on our list at any time. 75 percent of the wines we sell would not last to day No. 2, and so those wines go home with the owners, employees, or they go down the drain at night’s end. The other 25 percent that do last to day No. 2 may in fact be better with some oxygen, and we’ll tell you in detail why that is. Heck, we’ll even pour you a new bottle versus Day No. 2’s bottle so you can see for yourself. As I said to our reviewer, I’d rather showcase 15 wines that show as well as they possibly could, than to sell 50 wines living on borrowed time: flat and soft, and without all that Mother Nature has put into those grapes. I believe we owe it to the folks who work their tails off working the land, gently processing the fruit, and then waiting for those wines to mature to the point that they’re ready to be shared with the rest of the world. You can decide for yourself. Just understand what really is behind a steakhouse with 100 wines by-the-glass or a wine bar with a suspiciously-large list. Take a look at how they store their wines. Are the whites kept in a commercial fridge at 39 degrees, or in a wine refrigerator at 52 degrees? Are there dozens of open bottles on the bar with corks precariously sitting on the bottle, or are the corks jammed all the way in to help seal out oxygen? Take note of how many open bottles you see if you are there near opening. I suspect you’ll be shocked. You wouldn’t serve a dinner guest four-day-old wine, would you? Mike Kallay and his wife, Stephanie, own the Cask Room, a wine bar in East Village. www.thecaskroom.com