Home / ANALYSIS / Back of House / The glass salute: A profitable wine programme

Wine by the glass often sells more wine that a per bottle programme
[More Images]

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.

Story continues below

Advertisement

COMMENT Comment on this article

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.