What are the most effective strategies for managing a wine program?

Define Your Concept: Determine the focus and style of your wine program. Adapt and evolve your strategy based on customer feedback and changing industry trends.

Ideally, your wine list , or your menu, should also suggest wine and food pairings to make it easy for your customer to select a wine without asking. Always remember that asking is an extra step that some customers will not do. They will just disengage rather than seem unknowledgeable.

Offer Tasting Flights: Tasting flights allow guests to explore different wines in smaller portions and can be a great way to educate customers.

A good way to ensure serving temperature is to have separate wine cellars that accommodate a sufficient quantity of the wines ready to pour. Temperature is key and some wine cellars don’t have enough power to keep white wines at right temperature.

Training your staff and letting them taste the wine is critical. They cannot suggest good pairings and sell the wine if they don’t know your list.

Build Relationships with Suppliers: Establish strong relationships with wine distributors and wineries to access exclusive or limited-production wines and guarantee tasting of the new vintages and new releases directly from the producer or supplier at no cost and with the best information.

Control your cost, and your data related to the wines you sell. Extract the data from your system, and process it through simple CVS file and check the trends. What product sells the most ? Which product has been in your cellar for a while ? Talk to other F&B professionals in your area, and befriend the supplier. Are you having a better deal than the other restaurant ? What's their pricing ? ASK FOR FREE SAMPLES ! In very competitive cities, the suppliers will go over and beyond to make you buy the product, take advantage of it.

When costing wine, always consider both the cost percentage and the contribution dollars. Any bottle of wine that you sell, whether it is for $10 or $1,000 basically takes the same amount of time and effort for your servers. You can have a much higher cost percentage on more expensive wines while still putting more contribution dollars on your P&L compared to less expensive wines. If you offer expensive wines at a great deal compared to your competitors (one where you still make significant money), you can drive higher-end wine sales. Giving your guests a chance to try an amazing wine and increasing your overall profit.

Host Wine Events: Organize wine tastings, wine dinners, or educational sessions to engage your customers and create a buzz around your wine program.

This is key. You should know what your customers order and build a list that will have wines they will engage with easily. Your staff should be able to suggest more unfamiliar wines from your list that they may love as well. Train your staff!

Open one bottle of you by the glass program or your wine list, regularly to make it available to customers for sampling. Easy, relatively cost efficient and crowd pleaser. Every body is up for a free glass! And most of the hesitant patrons will defintely go for it. So it is a win-win!

Create a feeling of belonging to the community - I was part of the team that built the Worlds Largest Wine Club with over 525,000 members. Building Community was huge part of that success! Few people come right out and say it, but the desire to belong and feel like you’re a part of a community is a basic human need and longing. The sad thing is, Cigna’s 2020 Loneliness Index revealed that three in five Americans consider themselves lonely. They don’t experience a sense of belonging and community. Why are people feeling lonely and craving community now more than ever? Because modern life makes it difficult to find and build a community.