While some dining spots care allot about their wine service that visiting is a pleasure, too many restaurants either don’t care about their customers or just don’t get it.  When faced with the latter experience, consider these tips when choosing to order red or white wine.  1.  Resist paying more than triple markup for a bottle of wine in a restaurant (restaurants pay wholesale), don’t be afraid to comment if the wines offered are marked up way too much.  2.  Before you order wine by the glass, calculate the price vs. a bottle of the same wine, especially if you and your group are going to drink more than a couple of glasses during a meal.  A average bottle gets you max 6 glasses of wine (restaurant pours).  3.  If the vintage is not printed on the wine list, ask for it, especially is the wine is red. Most reds improve with age, so you will probably find a older year more palatable than a younger than all things considered.  4.  Rather than ordering the same two glasses or bottles of wine during the meal, consider sampling two different types.  It makes for a special evening and inevitably leads to a discussion as to which wine the group prefers.  5.  The old adage about red wine with meat, white wine with seafood is an old adage because its true.  Those wines and those favors work best together , with a few exceptions.  But the point is that you’re in a restaurant to enjoy yourself and you should choose the wine you like.  So if you want a chardonnay with that prime fillet or a merlot with stone crabs, order it.  6. You cannot tell anything about the quality of wine by smelling its cork.  Only sniffing and tasting the wine will tell you if your bottle is bad.  When a wine is bad, it’s usually due to a bad cork, which leaves the wine smelling distinctly like wet cardboard, and there is a bad a difference between a wine that is bad and one that just doesn’t taste the way you want it to.