Uncorkd Wine Trends 2017

Orange Wine on the Restaurant Wine List – Trend or New Standard

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The trendiest thing to hit wine consumers lately is orange wine. Many are calling orange wine the new rosé. Sommeliers have been familiar with orange wine for decades and in fact the process of making orange wine goes back over 5,000 years. Put simply, orange wine is using white wine grapes but keeping them in contact with the skin to producer wine with an orangish hue and wonderful, unique flavors and complexities that can be considered a hybrid of white and red. Pretty much the opposite of rosé, where red wine grapes are crushed and the skin quickly removed. Restaurants around the country are adding orange wines to their menu, have you? If not, you need to add orange wines to your restaurant wine list ASAP. Here’s why. Read more

French Connection: A Short Guide on French Wine Regions and their Grapes

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It can be intimidating to start your wine education. As you dig down into the soil bed of wine you can find yourself pushed up against thousands of years of nuance and history associated with the fabled elixir. There are important geographies, a unique lexicon, long histories that span across countries, famous vintages, and much pride that comes along with wine production. I

If you work at a restaurant or bar, or are just a curious consumer, there is a lot you feel like you’re missing when you’re dealing with wine. For me, one of those head-scratching moments comes from understanding the differences and similarities between French and American wines. In this post, I aim to help you out with some of those distinctions.  Read more

Do’s and Don’ts Of A Good By-the-Glass Wine List

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What makes a good wine-by-the-glass list?

Thankfully,  quality wine-by-the-glass lists are becoming easier to find while dining out. It’s the age of adventurous diners and drinkers, so customers are willing to try something new. And a glass pour of wine is a great way for customers to try something they’ve never had before.

But what actually makes a good glass pour list? Read more

Sparkling Wine Leads Overall Wine Growth

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Sparkling wine continues its growth in both U.S. and U.K. markets.

The overall wine category has grown in the U.S. market for 22-straight years. And its future continues to look bright as many publications and industry experts note that millennials are drinking more expensive wine, and more often, than previous generations.

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For The Weekend: Summer Recipes to Savor Before Fall

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The end of August and start of September is a time of change. Summer is slowly winding down and the sometime phantom season of fall is (hopefully) approaching. Kids go back to school. Our favorite television shows are starting up. Your local farmers market selection is dwindling and will be ending soon. It’s a time when our tastes change and restaurants begin to tinker with  menus, experimenting with dishes that offer the bold flavors of fall. But wait! If you haven’t had your fill of summer yet, there’s still time. Here is a list of end-of-summer ingredients that are at their peak, and some recipes for dishes to devour before summer fades into fall.

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Creating Custom Beverage Menus With Private Bottle Programs

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There is a growing trend of adventurous restaurant goers who seek out new and unique experiences. Customers at bars and restaurants are looking for new wines to drink, old cocktail recipes to resurrect, and exotic fusions of new flavors to taste.

One trend on the rise in the beverage industry that consumers are excited about is private bottle programs. Read more

Harsh Truths of Operating a Restaurant

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Owning and running a restaurant is hard and generally under-appreciated, especially if you’re not Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsey.  Last month, Amanda Cohen, the owner of Dirt Candy in NYC, wrote an article in Eater called Harsh Truths: Failure Is Always on the Table When Opening a Restaurant. I think this post is a must read for restaurant owners and operators. She provides an honest assessment of her struggles with running her restaurant. As an acclaimed chef and industry veteran,  everything was seemingly going well from the outside, but the financial success was not following.

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7 Tips for Training Wait Staff on Your Wine and Beverage Program

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Restaurant Wait Staff Training

We talk to dozens of restaurants every day and they often tell us one of their top challenges is training their wait staff.  And training staff on the wine list and beverage program can be extra difficult because there can be a lot of items, many details to know and it changes all the time. There’s a few core things you want your wait staff to know about your beverage program: Read more

Organizing a Restaurant Wine List

Best Tips for Organizing Your Restaurant Wine List

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So you’re creating a new wine list, overhauling your existing list, or just looking at ways to improve. We review hundreds of wine lists a month and along with our own data on designing for increased wine sales and our alcohol restaurant research report, both worth taking a look at, I’m here to provide tips for organizing your wine list.

Wine List Objectives
Before getting started, we need to understand what the goals are of the wine list. And not just from the customer’s perspective, but more importantly from the restaurant’s. So what do we want to accomplish…

  1. Encourage customers to drink wine who otherwise may not
  2. Encourage customers to order a higher priced (or margin) item
  3. Ensure the customer enjoys their selection and has a good experience

Of course, you may have additional objectives. Maybe that’s winning a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence award or showcasing rare Bordeaux’s in your cellar. But whatever else you’re trying to accomplish, you are running a hospitality business first and you should be looking to maximize profits and guest satisfaction.

Organizing the Wine List to Maximize Sales
Let’s start out with what not to do if you want to maximize wine sales. Do not organize your list by price. This is the cardinal rule. You’re better off putting your wines in a random order than by price. Why? Because customers will start at the top and only go down to their price comfort level and not explore any further. And if your customers doesn’t know much about wine at all? They’ll order the second cheapest wine all the time.

Now that you know not to organize your list by price, how else can you do it? Your best bet is to organize by flavor profile, from light to full. This provides a lot of value to customers who know what taste they like or what they’re going to eat. Of course, this requires a little more work on your part, but don’t hesitate to ask your distributors for help.

If you don’t organize by flavor profile, you can order alphabetically, by bin number, by region or other orders that provide some clarity to guests and staff.

 

Categorizing Your Wine List
How many categories to use on your wine list will depend on the overall size of the list, but the ideal target is 3-5 categories for each major section. For example if Red Wines is a section, 3-5 categories beneath that to organize your list. This is where I see a lot of restaurants go wrong, but also an opportunity to really set your restaurant apart. You want categories that make sense for the customer – that helps them find what they are looking for or leads them to something they will like.

The best tips for organizing your wine list and categories:

  1. Keep categories consistent. Don’t organize one area by country and another by varietal. That will make browsing the menu very confusing for diners.
  2. Think about how you want to handle unusual varietals. Introducing customers to unique grapes and wines can be great for your beverage program, but tricky to organize. Consider listing them with other grapes they are similar too, which would be better than just listing them in an Other Varietals category.

  3. Highlight special selections on your list. Use a reserve section, denote featured items with an icon, or otherwise call out wines you want to highlight. Make these wines you want to move out of inventory, special deals and/or rare or hard to find wines.
  4. Customers want food and wine pairings. If you have a large wine list, creating food pairings for everything can be time consuming. But consumers say the number one change they want for wine lists is food pairings and to find wines that match what they are eating. If you don’t create pairing suggestions for every item, at least create them for some and rotate frequently. This will sell more wine and deliver a better experience.
  5. Provide detailed information about each wine. Along with food pairing suggestions, today’s customer wants information. They have access to everything on demand on their phone, but preempt them pulling out a phone by providing good information yourself. At a minimum include the country, region, subregion and appellation. Also include the varietal for US wines and other countries where listing the grape is the norm. Include the producer, if not mentioned in the name.

Take it one step further by providing tasting notes. With a large wine list, this can be a challenge, but one of the great reasons to use Uncorkd’s iPad beverage menus, where you have access to our enormous wine database that does all this work for you. Not only does providing all of this information help your guests, it helps increase staff knowledge and improves waitstaff training.

Red Wine Pour

Sommelier Surge in Restaurants

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Sommeliers are most famously known to be working in fine dining establishments, overseeing the wine program with their stereotypical snooty attitudes. These practices are changing, however, as sommeliers are getting recruited by more casual restaurants who want an expert to help the guests with a friendly disposition. How do you know if you should recruit a sommelier, and what are the benefits associated with doing so?

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