Why can't I keep my bottle of wine on my table?

Q. We enjoy the inventive Asian-fusion cuisine at a restaurant where the wine list is quite carefully "curated", so you pay a high price for the pleasure. However, customers are not allowed to keep the wine they've purchased on the table. All bottles are kept on a separate counter. We've taken visitors there several times but everyone gets quite cranky when the waitstaff say that, "due to the Responsible Service of Alcohol guidelines, we are not allowed to let you keep your bottle on the table". We've stopped frequenting the place. Is this a trend coming our way everywhere?

A. Before becoming an agony aunt I was a stupormum, which is like being a supermum but with lower KPIs. All you have to do is spend your sleep-deprived days with small children and evenings herding them into bed, hoping for time to pour a glass of wine prior to passing out yourself. During this period I developed a theory of inverse proportions: "When cooking a meal for toddlers, the amount of food consumed will be inversely proportionate to the effort expended making it."

Another such theory is: "The posher the restaurant – and the less likely it is to host a drunken melee – the more likely it is to quarantine wine bottles beyond patrons' reach."

Of course, this is not usually a practice designed to prevent rampant over-consumption – it's more about enabling gun floor staff to demonstrate a preternatural talent for knowing you want a top-up even before you do (fine when they do, frustrating when they don't). If you ask nicely, most such places will leave the bottle on the table.

But it seems you have asked and – despite being grown-up and civilised – been denied. Where do official guidelines come into this? Each Australian state and territory has its own laws concerning the sale and service of alcohol. In Victoria, where your inquiry came from, all staff serving alcohol are required to have completed Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) training. Individual venues have their own policies complying with state RSA guidelines. The details vary between venues, and it's hard to know why your Asian-fusion restaurant's policy is this stringent. Is this something we're going to see in every restaurant? I don't think so, and I hope not.

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