My boyfriend and I were in Saint Tropez for a night after a wedding, and wanted to treat ourselves to a delicious meal at Rivea in early July 2017. We had a lovely start to the meal - some complimentary snacks, delicious olives, fantastic starters. We'd ordered a bottle of red from AOC Provence, and knowing that reds from Provence should really be enjoyed after 5 years and that anytime before would yield a wine too young for the palate, we chose a red from 2011. It was on the cheaper end of the list, but we chose it deliberately for its age, despite the price.
Later after I sip the wine, I tell my boyfriend, "This doesn't taste.. great." We chock it up to the wine being on the cheaper end and continue enjoying our meal. I then start turning the bottle around to read the label out of curiosity, and my boyfriend notices the wine we've been brought was a 2014 from the same label as the wine we'd ordered but 3 years younger.
We called the sommelier over, and tell him this is not the wine we ordered. He starts getting antsy and tells us, unapologetically, oh we ran out of the wine you ordered, so we gave you this. In such a highly rated establishment where we were dropping a non-insignificant amount of money, the expected behavior would be having the somm tell us the wine we wanted was unavailable, and give us the option of choosing this other wine, or choosing something else on the list. Undoubtedly, if we hadn't noticed, he would've charged us the same as the original wine we ordered and pretended we'd been sipping that one, even though given this one's age, it would've been a far cheaper replacement.
He stands there uncomfortably a beat, without offering us any form of apology or offer to remedy the situation, and we have to ask him for the menu to choose another wine because we know this wine was opened way too young for its region. Clearly, he thought he had a pair of uneducated American tourists on this hands, whom he could dupe with a cheaper, too-young bottle and not have us notice because we couldn't tell the difference (too bad we actually spent our time educating ourselves on wines of various regions of France).
Finally, he clears out our existing wines and brings out a new bottle we choose that's along the same year we wanted. We ask him politely if he ever planned on telling us about the replacement wine, and he bumbles a response. At the end of the meal, we end up getting charged the (slightly more expensive) price of the new wine with no offer to comp the wine, and the only thing we're given as 'compensation' for the deliberate mistake is 2 shots of 1euro limoncello. It's clear at the end of the meal the sommelier is begging us in his mind to not mention it to the manager or to our server, and we don't, only because we have plans to stop by the club nearby after the meal.
Honestly, at a less well-renowned establishment, we could've forgiven this as a mistake of an inexperienced server who didn't know wine or understand service standards. But at a place like this, and especially one where you hire a sommelier whose sole job is to understand wines and presumably, the wines of your region, we saw this as nothing other than a deliberate attempt to dupe tourists with a cheaper bottle not fit for consumption, with the assumption that these dumb Americans would never realize. Given this, I cannot recommend this establishment to others visiting, as this left a terrible taste in my mouth, especially with no attempt by the establishment to make up for their mistakes. read more
