Change the menu; the era of the house white and house red is dead. Overall, the fundamental purpose of selling wine by the glass is to push sales because true profit happens only if volume is moved. Selling more wine, even by the glass is a good thing, writes Thomas Sauzet
The fear of controlling wine quality and costs associated with a wine-by-the-glass programme has always been around. If you employ smart strategies to control the wine cost, you can reduce spoilage and offer your guests some great wines by the glass.
This is one of the few instances where it is OK to think of wine as a sum of parts rather than as a bottle. Similar to spirits, wine is moving down to a denominator smaller than a bottle. It is actually a step up for wine and a sign of a maturing market.
Offering an interesting wine-by-the-glass programme is both more profitable and smart marketing. A customer today wants to learn, experience and sample as many wines as he can. How fortunate that today’s drinker is able to taste a wider, more interesting assortment of wines for much less than before.
Wine-by-the-glass is an accepted practice in the West and other mature markets. An excellent Indian example of a successful programme is the Shangri-La hotel in New Delhi. I was personally involved with this programme and as per the management, their selection of 32 wines-by-the-glass along with the use of wine conservation units has dramatically increased their wine revenue.
Overall, this programme’s fundamental purpose is to push sales because true profit happens only if volume is moved. Selling more wine, even by the glass is a good thing.
As in all aspects of the restaurant experience, the wine-by-the-glass programme should intrigue and entertain your guests. Many guests respond to an increase in choices with an increase in spending. By offering more choices, you allow them to step up to incrementally more expensive wines and then wine-by-the-glass becomes an asset, not a liability, in the struggle for higher check averages. The era of the house white and house red died ages ago. Indeed, the habit of offering a house Chardonnay is a relic, at odds with guest interests in living well and seeking out new and interesting things.
But how many selections are enough? The minimum number of wines you offer by the glass should be a factor of your budget, customer base and sales goals. It is a seven step process starting with an assessment of your service capacity. You might start from the assumption that you will never have enough wine storage to support a successful wine programme. Certainly, only a few operations have enough room for chilled wine storage. So before you can take the first step in building this programme, assess how many bottles you can keep chilled at one time.
Now ask yourself how many glasses of wine are likely to be served in one shift. If there are 100 seats in the restaurant and you expect no more than two seatings each shift, perhaps it is likely you can sell wine to at least one-quarter of these guests.
Then consider how many wine drinkers will prefer to purchase by the glass versus bottle. Attack the problem by day part. At lunch, very few wine bottles are served and rarely will your guests buy more than one glass, if they do have a glass. At dinner, you can expect to sell more bottles of wine than separate glasses. But the number of bottles sold will depend upon a host of issues, including server training, price and presentation of cuisine; guest perception of your value; ease of wine service, allure of the wine selections, and the friendliness and readability of the list itself.
In sorting out all these possibilities, you might be able to estimate that the restaurant can sell 30-50 glasses of wine each night and 20-30 at the lunch shift. If you have six different wines by the glass and if you get five glasses out of each bottle, then you would think that you would need no more than three bottles of each wine by the glass chilled ahead of time.
But guests can be funny in the way they order wine. One night, you will sell only a few glasses of a particular wine, the next night you will not be able to keep enough bottles chilled. Often sales of certain wines are tied to the selling skills of certain servers. Track sales by day part and in due course you will get a sense of your inventory requirements.
Target your sales goals. If you have developed a good wine business plan, then you know what sort of rupees sales you want to achieve. You should be clear about what percentage of those sales should come from alcohol beverage and specifically from wine sales.
A good rule of thumb in any sales projection is to take your worst-case scenario and then reduce it by 25%. This is especially true in projecting wine-by-the-glass sales. You might like to see one-quarter of your sales generated by your wine programme, but that would put you in rarefied company. Unless you have amazingly well-trained staff, do not bank on it.
It is wiser to create modest ambitions and closely track every sale. From there, you can decide how you want to grow your by-the-glass selection. And as you grow the list, you should expect revenues to increase at a greater rate than sales by volume. That is to say, a more interesting and diverse wine-by-the-glass list might not increase the number of glasses sold, but you should see the average price paid per glass creep upward.
For example, if you offer only one Chardonnay for Rs500 per glass and you begin offering two different Chardonnays, one for Rs400 and the other for Rs600, the total rupee sales will increase. Indeed the Rs600 glass of Chardonnay will likely outsell the less expensive Chardonnay.
A good wine-by-the-glass list also introduces guests to wines, grapes, styles and regions new to them. This is for the average wine drinker who would like to feel confident in his knowledge of wines, but is not going to gamble on a label or variety with which he is not familiar with. Without a wine-by-the-glass programme, you will have a difficult time showcasing new, unknown or unusual wines. Consider it marketing in the same vein as wineries offer wine tasting.
Try to please most people most of the time. Like any good wine list, a wine-by-the-glass list offers balance and choice, within the limits of the concept and your budget. These choices should include a variety of grapes, regions and above all styles.
Consider pricing and promotion. The categories that reflect popular opinion should be the focus of your first efforts with high-priced offerings. Grapes such as Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon best represent those categories.
In our earlier example, two Chardonnay labels were offered, one at Rs400 and the other at Rs600. The next step would be to introduce white Burgundy or highly regarded American Chardonnay for Rs900 or more. By offering different price ranges, styles and regions of origin, the customer is given a reason to test the wines. Hence, both guest and server learn something. It is easier to buy and sell a bottle of anything with which you are familiar.
Train staff to sell and serve. If there is a single and simple reason to explain the failure of ambitious wine programmes, it is that servers are not trained to explain the wine. You can train through multi-media programmes, videos, seminars and even trips to vineyards. But none of this is as important as simple tasting. Ask your wine supplier to provide you with the required information.
An advantage of a great wine-by-the-glass programme is that the servers have a chance to find out how those wines taste. It does not take a server seminar on a valuable Sunday afternoon. A manager can permit the servers to smell or perhaps taste the last ounce out of an open and soon-to-be-tossed bottle of wine at the end of the shift. That’s easy.
Develop a schedule. Choose a new wine to feature each month. This allows your clients to taste a new wine and the opportunity to buy a glass or a bottle with their meal. Getting your wine supplier involved in the promotion will help reduce any costs on the printing and development of marketing materials.
You can also start by selecting a winery and feature a new red wine and white wine each month. Information on popular and elite wineries can be obtained through your wine supplier or from sites such as wine.com and winespectator.com.
The promotion should include a description of the winery’s history along with the grape varietals origin, characteristics and the types of food that the wines best accompany.
The wines of the month programme can also be used with a seasonal theme. The executive chef is a big part of this seasonal promotion. Select the seasonal wines with the chef based on the seasonal featured menu items.
And finally, create visibility. Table tents or wine-by-the-glass menus are proven sellers. But the lack of respect often accorded to wine-by-the-glass too often creeps into the menus and table tents. The wines offered by the glass should be posted with other specials of the day and printed on the menu where possible. Daily line-up should include a tasting of any new wine-by-the-glass. A wine-by-the-glass programme must be visible to succeed.
These are just a few of the many ways to promote wines by the glass in your restaurant. As with any wine-by-the-glass programme, it is critical to ensure wine quality is maintained at the highest level once the bottle is opened. For this, conduct frequent inventories and use strategies to reduce the number of wines opened at any given time.
Selling wine by the glass needs to be fun for both your employees and clients, so go ahead, get creative.
Thomas Sauzet has been in the Indian wine trade since 2005. He recently established the Thomas Sauzet Consultancy specialising in wine and represents TASTE, an international wine, food, spirits and hospitality trade fair scheduled for Mumbai in January 2010. He can be contacted on winesolution@gmail.com
