Bottle Begone

The new location of Aida Bistro & Wine Bar (6741 Columbia Gateway Dr., Columbia, 410-953-0500) offers more than an enlarged space and the restaurant's delectable Italian entrees and homemade pastas. It now has a sleek arrangement of 20 silver taps for wine at the bar plus a display case holding five-gallon kegs. These kegs, containing wine mostly from Virginia, California, and Oregon, dispense the liquid through the taps, allowing patrons to order as little as three ounces at a time. Aida owners Mary and Joe Barbera worked with AC Beverage Inc. in Annapolis to create the custom system, which uses nitrogen to protect the wines from potentially damaging oxygen. "We just became very aware, with our wine-by-the-glass program, that we had a lot of waste," Mary Barbera says. The process also eliminates the refuse of bottles and corks (each keg holds the equivalent of 24 bottles), and the reds and whites we sampled tasted as fresh as if they had been poured from newly opened bottles. Barbera predicts, "This is going to be something that is very, very popular."