While I was in Vegas, I found myself in a table game.

No, not poker or craps. Lunch.

The place: Mario Batali's Enoteca San Marco, a casual restaurant located in the Venetian hotel's attractive rendition of a Venice piazza.

I told the sommelier I was looking for a fresh, fruity wine with lunch, but also that I was intrigued by the 1997 Sandrone Valmaggiore, a wine made from the nebbiolo grape, as are all of Sandrone's great and wildly expensive 1997 Barolos.

At $75, the Valmaggiore had to be a steal, right?

So wrong. It was quite bad.

Reddish-brown, dark, brooding, well over the hill. A barely drinkable wine, totally without fruit or charm. On the other hand, it wasn't technically flawed. It was just no good.

I told the sommelier—anyway, she said she was a sommelier, even if she didn't act like one—that it was unpleasant, everything I didn't want in a luncheon wine. In fact, it was nothing anybody would want in a wine, regardless of the time of day.

She looked at me as though I was making no sense.

I invited her to taste it and tell me what she thought. She said she would take it to the wine director of the restaurant to get his opinion.

She returned 10 or 15 minutes later, after we all were well into our appetizers, and said, "He tasted it and said it showed the way a '97 of this varietal should show now."

She stood there, waiting for me to make the next move.

This is where matters stood at this very dumb restaurant: I was angry. The guests at my table were unhappy because they had expected wine with their food and were without any. Basically, the sommelier's boss had called for a confrontation over a wine I would guess cost him no more than $25 wholesale. Had she taken it away and brought something else, the restaurant would have had a happy table of customers and he would easily have made up the $25 loss on the substitute wine.

Instead, it was showdown at the gondola canal.

I told her we'd pay for the wine we didn't like. I told her to take it away. I ordered a different wine—a cheaper one, since I no longer had respect for the wine program of the restaurant. And since the place was billing itself as an "enoteca," a term used to designate a wine bar with food, that meant I had no use for Enoteca San Marco at all.

We finished the lunch. The waiter brought the bill. We did not get charged for the rejected wine. At the end, the restaurant did the right thing.

Still, it shouldn't have been that difficult. And the lesson wine drinkers should take away from my experience is: Stick by your beliefs. I don't like having to pay $75 for a wine I know should have been taken back without complaint, but I would have. Had we ended up drinking the '97 Sandrone, as the wine director wanted us to do, it would have ruined our lunch. That's too high a price to pay.

The price the restaurant paid for its rigidness? It lost three customers. (Actually, that's not such a fatal error in Vegas, since few people have an opportunity to come back anyway.)

By the way, there was a bonus. As my friends and I left the restaurant, a gaggle of strolling entertainers entered the simulated piazza. Not only had I won the game, the fat lady started to sing.