So I was all set to do a post about the latest Minneapolis restaurant to waive corkage fees: Morton’s the Steakhouse. “All you have to do is ask,” a manager told me Wednesday night.

Well, the deal’s off. Everything’s off at Morton’s, which closed on Thursday. In the process, we lost not only a great no-corkage opportunity but also the Twin Cities’ best cheeseburger. (If you told me they used ground New York strip for this killer burger, I would not be in the least surprised.)

A dramatic dropoff in corporate business had been nailing Morton’s, a source told me. At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, about 10 percent of the tables were occupied.

It’s a totally different climate out there, folks, and that’s all the more reason that more restaurants should do what Morton’s had done with its corkage fees, even if it was too little, too late.

Restaurants are struggling mightily and need to get more customers in seats. Some of them have tumbled to the fact that one way to do that is to make their places more friendly to those who want to bring in wine that’s not on their list. Customers who want to take advantage of that should offer a pour for their server and/or the chef, and perhaps buy a glass or bottle from the restaurant.

A ton of eateries already have deals going (see the link for half-price wine nights on the right-hand side of this page). And we’re going to see more reduced or waived corkage fees, and more alliances beween restaurants and retailers such as the France44-Crave and Cellars-Lake Elmo Inn deals I’ve written about.

Can’t happen soon enough, I say. I’m just sorry I never got a chance to tote an A. Rafanelli zin to Morton’s to have with that burger. Homer Simpson yummy sounds would definitely have ensued.

No explanation provided, alas, but this picture is worth … well, not as much as the wine.

I thought last summer would be torrontés’ time in the Twin Cities. Oh well.

So I’m not going to predict that this year Agentina’s distinctive white grape will catch fire, either. There are so many great whites coming out of Italy, Spain, southern France, South Africa, etc., that it’s folly to predict what the next one to “take off” will be. 

All I really know is that there are some nice exemplars of 2007 torrontés out there, including these two — one of which might have been Gov. Mark & Senorina Maria’s sipper during their sundry assignations:

Michel Torino Cafayate Valley Don David Reserve Torrontes: A lovely floral/fruity nose portends the aromatic flavors to come. Light and lively on the palate, it finishes lean and clean. The ‘06 was one of my first Wines of the Week, and the ‘07 is just as tasty.

Andeluna Torrontés Tupungato Winemaker’s Selection Torrontés: This is a slightly richer wine with a touch of sweetness on the palate and then a dry-ish finish. Grilled garlic shrimp would rock with this.

The winner: Well, the Michel Torino is slightly better, but it’s also about $2 more ($15-$17). So let’s call it a draw.

In an America where banks and other businesses are “too big to fail,” it’s nice sometimes to turn our attention to the little guys, the smaller wineries and retail outlets that are trying to make their marks. Or just make it, period. The other day, I visited such a place, a new store in Plymouth called Vinifera.

What a delightful surprise. Shoehorned into a nondescript strip mall (is there a strip mall anywhere that is non-nondescript, and if so, would that make it “descript”?), the store is a narrow but very welcoming space. There’s one rack apiece of craft beer and spirits, but the focus is definitely on wine. The selection is beautifully chosen, the prices more than fair. Several wines scattered around the store proffered some nice sale prices.

The father-son tandem of Christian and Dave Nesheim maight have taken on a Sisyphusian task, but their store is a soothing oasis near the bustling interesdection of Hwys. 6 & 101.

St. Cloud wine educator Kent Benson wrote an incisive article about wine terminology for a recent edition of Wines & Vines. This local wine watchdog does a good job of keeping me on my toes on this and other oenological matters.

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Add Papa’s Deli in North Minneapolis to the list of local restaurants with half-price wines a couple of nights a week, on Monday and Tuesday.

Also, the Lake Elmo Inn is waiving corkage on bottles purchased at the Cellars as long as the wine is not on their list. You’ll need to bring along the receipt from the store.

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One of the great quaffing events of the summer, Haskell’s Beer & Wine Cruise, boards at 5:30 p.m. sharp on July 14 at Harriet Island in St. Paul. Cost for the 14th annual event is $50 for Bacchus Society members, $55 for non-members. Call 612-342-2437, ext. 921 for more info.

“That’s probably gonna show up on YouTube tomorrow,” wine importer extraordinaire quipped after throwing out a hilarious obscenity toward the end of a tasting Wednesday night. Well, how about the Internet the day after that, Terry?

After a wonderfully lively, smart and sassy session, Theise opened the floor for Q&A. An attendee raved and rambled about the wonders of the (very) different Donnhoff wines and asked how Theise could explain the varying results from the same basic vineyard – ”in three words,” he quickly added.

“No f-ing idea,” Theise responded almost as quickly. OK, you probably had to be there, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have already consumed some of the wonderful wines that Theies imports from Austria and Germany.

Anyway, after the guffawing subsided, the ever-loquacious Theise took a stab at answering, with his usual mix of Zen poetry-like soliloquys and some uncommon horse sense. It was one of many highlights of a perfectly delightful evening shared with about 100 corkheads at, of all places, Elsie’s bowling alley in Nordeast. Blessedly (I think), we were in a party room and couldn’t hear the pins drop.

Theise is nothing if not a hedonist. He compared authors who use footnotes to inept sexual partners and ended an airplane anecdote with the phrase “return your stewardess to the upright position.” He gushed lovingly about his wines from Austria and Germany, and with good reason.

Some of his best material concerned food. He talked of a wine that goes well with every vegetable, even the one that his wife, iconic Wisconsin chef Odessa Piper, calls “sparklefarts” (Brussels sprouts to you and me). He also had a great take on pairing: Just learn what you can and then “use your instincts, experiment. Don’t obsess over hitting the bull’s eye; just try to hit the target and avoid spraying arrows into the woods.”  

And his wines ranged from really tasty to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The evening started with the best $25 bubbly I’ve ever tasted, a 70-percent0-gruner-veltliner concoction from Schloss Gobelsburg, and ended with an astounding $38 Spatlese from Jakob Schneider. I bought four bottles of each without batting an eye.

Theise will be back in November. Anyone who loves wine and/or a great raconteur should be there.

I had some really good organically grown and biodynamic wines Monday, but I can’t tell you what they were.

Actually, I later found out what a couple of them were, but when I was trying them, they were numbers rather than names. I was a judge for the second International Green Wine Competition in Santa Rosa, Calif. It was my first foray into judging, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The judges were divided into two panels, each of which rated about 100 wines. Our group awarded four golds and a slew of silvers and bronzes, and found only two wines not worth recognizing.

Here’s how it worked: We did the reds in the morning, when our palates were fresher, and the whites after lunch. We were presented with flights of the same varietal or blend, each with a three- or four-digit numeral on an attached card. We took as long as we needed to sample — I went through each flight once, taking notes, then backwards through it again, sometimes adjusting my grade. The grades were G for gold, S for silver, B for bronze and N for “no-way-no-how anyone should buy this swill” (or something like that).  As it was back in school days, we often appended a plus or minus to the grade.

The final designation was the average of the grades. If that couldn’t be readily determined, we’d talk about the wine, and someone would raise or lower a grade to get us to a semi-consensus.

To earn a Double Gold, a wine had to get G’s from all the judges; that didn’t happen in our group. To earn a “no medal,” though, only one of us had to vote that way — and then convince the others that this wine deserved no medal. If we were headed that way, we’d ask for another bottle of the same wine, just to be sure. We all agreed on one seriously flawed wine, and I won the panel over on a sauvignon blanc that had an overwhelming cat-pee aroma. (There’s nothing wrong with that being part of the bouquet, but not to this litterbox-esque degree.)

The other judges on my panel were fun and smart. Jim Caudill is a Kendall-Jackson veteran who runs a PR company in Santa Rosa. Jil Child plans and coordinates personalized excursions with Wine Treks of the World. And Amy Atwood has a swell blog “with an organic bent” called MyDailyWine.

Here’s the really good news: Jil was a judge last year and said that this year’s lot was ”probably 75 percent better” than the 2008 entries. I have noticed an improvement in wines with organically grown grapes as well.

I moseyed over to the coordinators’ space after we were done to identify two wines I had particularly liked; turns out they were an Alma Rosa pinot noir and a white blend from Oregon’s Montinore winery called Borealis, which was primarily muller thurgau (one of my new favorite grapes).

The medalists will be posted at the competition’s website next week.