Wine is one of the
easiest products to stock and sell - and also one of the most profitable. Time to review your approach, says Andrew Jefford
What's the biggest difference between wine and beer? No, I'm not referring to the fact that the former is made from grapes and the latter from barley and hops, nor to the fact that wine is usually twice as strong as beer. I don't mean the perplexingly different duty regimes, either, and I'm not talking about bottles versus casks or kegs.
What I'm really thinking of, from the licensee's point of view, is profit opportunity. No single item sold in most pubs offers a better chance for increased profits than wine. And when I talk to those I meet about what offer they would most like to see improved in pubs, it's usually wine that tops the list.
As it happens, over the past couple of years, I've been acting as a wine consultant to a Michelin-starred London restaurant.
My initial brief was to improve the value-for-money selections, so that the restaurant didn't get criticised for failing to offer inexpensive alternatives to its posher bottles. That was fun. The strange thing was that, once we'd done it, those inexpensive bottles moved very slowly. Critics and restaurant inspectors approved of them, but the customers weren't very interested.
Focus on wine quality
To our surprise, we had to re-buy the expensive bottles more often than the cheap ones. So we then increased the selection of fine wines, and provided descriptions for every one which would, as it were, whet the lips of potential purchasers. The result has been astonishing. If you help people spend more by making it easy, exciting and enjoyable, they love to do it.
I'm not, of course, suggesting that customers in community pubs in Sunderland or Swansea are going to be clamouring for fine wine in the same way that City boys eating out in the West End do.
The principle, though, is the same, even if the scale is different. Few customers, when they go out for an evening in the pub, are looking for the cheapest alternatives - otherwise pubs would never sell anything except cider and plates of chips.
Customers want something good, something better than average. If you deliver that, they are mostly happy to pay a little more, and sometimes a lot more.
The reason why the spotlight deserves to swing on to wine is simple. Wine offers far more opportunities for trading up than beer does. Ale aside (and price differentials on ales are small), the beer offer is brand-dominated, and the physical reality of dispensing it greatly limits the options you can offer.
Increased beer profits generally mean selling more beer, whereas increased wine profits can mean no more than selling better wine. Spirits are more diverse than beer, but pure spirit drinkers are a minority and a vast array of opened bottles sitting around for months on end isn't ideal either for the drinks themselves, or for your bar management.
It's far easier to improve the quality of what you are offering for wine than it is for food, too, for the simple reason that wine doesn't have to be prepared or cooked first.
Wine, for the host, is perhaps the most trouble free of all drinks to stock and serve, particularly now that screw-cap closures are replacing corks. Wine customers are rarely troublesome, and wine is increasingly enjoyed by customers of all ages and social classes.
Get tasting
So how do you make more money on wine? Essentially by getting involved with it, learning a bit about it and understanding it, and then by extending the range of what you are offering upwards to include some more unusual and more expensive bottles, sideways to offer more choice at your base price points, and throughout the selection to improve quality generally.
Naturally, this will be easier for those with the liberty to buy what they want than for those who are tied for wine, but unless you are running a managed house where every bottle is dictated by head office, there is usually some leeway in what you can stock.
Personal involvement is key. Taste the wines you are offering; develop your own opinions on them; produce wine lists, cards, notes for staff. If something doesn't taste good to you, it probably doesn't taste good to your customers, so get rid of it and find something better. Boring wine won't do any more, either: find something with personality and excitement.
If you are selling wine by the glass, monitor your bottles carefully so that no customer is ever served stale wine. Once a bottle is open, encourage the staff to sell it through; even Vac-u-Vin won't help beyond a few days.
Talk to your wine customers about what they like, and be led by them in improving every level of your range. Get in a few top bottles for those who might have something to celebrate: Dom Pérignon or Cristal Champagne, Grand Cru white burgundy or Chablis, classed-growth Bordeaux from a good recent vintage like 2001, or Penfold's Grange. Source a range of dessert wines for those who might prefer something sweet, from a Moscatel de Valencia up to a few bottles (or half-bottles) of classed-growth Sauternes or Barsac.
Service with style
Make sure you have top-quality glasses for great wines, and that your ordinary glasses are presentable, and properly washed and dried. Serve wine with style; even a pretty paper napkin helps.
Make sure top-quality bottles are stored correctly, too: lying down, in a dark, cool area of the cellar (screw-cap bottles can be stored upright if wished). For most pubs, this is actually easier than it is for most restaurants, which are often cellarless.
It's a good time to upgrade your wine offer, since wines from Europe's 2005 vintage are mostly in bottle, and quality (especially from Bordeaux and Burgundy) is very good.
At present Spain, Portugal and the south of France are offering some of the most attractive value for money I can ever recall - much better than that offered by the branded wines of those giant Australian and Californian conglomerates which tend to dominate the wine ranges of managed chains.
Smaller producers in Argentina and Chile are beginning to lead the way there, too, while the New Zealand Pinot Noir revolution has added some great red wines to what is already a fine white selection.
If you are able to source your own wines, try to make direct contact with merchants and importers. Their lists will help you move up the knowledge ladder as well as enabling you to stock better wines than you'll get via wholesalers or at a cash-and-carry.
Yes, it's all hard work, and you've got a million other things to do. But if you want to build bigger profits, wine will always reward your efforts fairly, and may do so handsomely.