Wine agony aunt: The hard to find 'riesling by the glass'

Why do so few restaurants offer riesling by the glass?

This is one of life's enduring mysteries, like why buses travel in pairs and FM breakfast hosts lack surnames. Riesling is an aristocrat among grape varieties, a perennial darling among wine professionals, a hot date for almost every Asian cuisine and yet – despite recent signs that it might be on the move – it's just not that popular.

Riesling's popularity peaked in the 1970s, a time at which more than a few Australian winemakers were cheerfully squashing white wine grapes of any variety and little distinction and calling the result "riesling".

But most of today's wine drinkers have forgotten those dark days. Wine bottled as riesling is the real thing. A new generation of women has learned to love platform shoes and kaftans. The male of the species sports more facial hair than a 1972 edition of The Joy of Sex. We've seen prawn cocktails sashay back onto fashionable menus and they show no signs of leaving. On these grounds it seems fair to assume that followers of fashion must be swilling riesling by the bucket.

But they're not and restaurateurs can't be in the business of offering wines by the glass that don't sell. Opened bottles lose condition quickly. That's why so many mid-range eateries' by-the-glass lists offer white drinkers two savvy blancs, a pinot grigio, a grudging chardonnay and not a single riesling.

On the upside, restaurants at the flash end of the market quite often have riesling by the glass. Such places are more likely to have invested in wine-preservation equipment, and in sommeliers who know how to sell individual wines. And it seems most people who work with wine really, really like riesling, whether it's from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria or Alsace in north-east France.

Your options are: eat at sexier places and suffer the undoubtedly memorable mark-ups; spend the next year or 20 hoping that some kind of trickle-down effect will reach the mid-market; go the BYO option; or just pipe down, be glad your favourite variety represents great value for money and hope no one else finds out.

In the meantime, carry a large handbag, a spare screwcap (one size fits all for most Australian wines) and plenty of chutzpah – that way you can order a bottle of riesling, drink a glass and take the rest home.