Taking Stock of Your Wine List

Pro tips on managing your restaurant’s wine list and inventory.
By Lara Creasy

Anyone who works in beverage management knows that writing a wine list is the fun part. You get to set up tastings, go to trade shows, take bottles home to drink and assess, taste wines with your chef’s food to see what works. Successfully managing that wine list is the part that can cause many restaurateurs to stumble.   

I got a group of Georgia beverage professionals together recently to offer their thoughts on what works for them in managing their wine lists, how they have avoided mistakes others before them have made, and how they lean on their team to make it all easier.   

Lara Creasy/Restaurant INFORMER:  Thank you all so much for being a part of this. Tell me a bit about the size of your wine lists. How do you recommend that a restaurant should determine the right number of selections for their wine list? What would be the benefits of a small list vs. a larger list?  

Bill/Sylvan Hotel: My hotel is a fun property with three venues plus in-room amenities. Each has its own identity. It’s a blessing and a challenge. One venue is a laid-back tequila bar, a cantina, which is not as wine-centric, more casual. Guests really don’t care what the wine is. They want a cab, they want a pinot, they want a chardonnay. You can have a lot of ambiguity in the program – it can be a chardonnay from anywhere.  

Randy/Slater Hospitality: We have just five wines at one of our concepts: the bar at Skyline Park. These are everyday wines that the everyday customer orders in a plastic cup; they are house wines. I’m not kidding though when I say, not only the wine, but the entire program, is the feather in my cap after 28 years of doing this. 

Lara: Really?? Tell us more! 

Randy: If we as somms are going to nerd out about a wine list with 1,000 bottles, we are going to be proud of it, but we often do it with ourselves in mind, and not the customer. There are people who just want a glass of wine. I could just find the common $4 bottle of wine for this venue, sell it for $8 a glass, make lots of money on it, and assume the customer isn’t going to care. But I’m pretty proud of the wine we have found to serve. The theme for what I do? There is nothing in our program that I wouldn’t be ok to serve my mom. 

Hospitality always has to be first. Listen to the guests. If they like big, fruit-forward California wines, try to help them find a wine that has that style, but also has that layer of care, the sourcing, the quality to go along with it.  

Janice/Lazy Betty: We have an ethos as a restaurant to focus on sustainability, reducing waste, thoughtful production, things like that. I prefer to buy wines from small, family-owned producers that are at least practicing organic and/or biodynamic. That idea also helps focus the list. And then there’s our style of service and price point. We’re a Michelin star restaurant with a prix fixe tasting menu. We have a lot of diners who have their own grand wine cellars and are looking for classic appellations. It’s important to have a good selection of true “fine wines” for those patrons. 

Seasonality also matters, especially for by the glass. It’s still important to consider what will work with the food, but I see the BTG [by the glass] list as the safe zone for guests. People who want just a glass or two want something familiar with grape names they recognize, such as Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Noir. When the weather is warmer, I do like to have a few more rosé options, chillable reds and beachy whites for by the glass. I put more weight on red wines and full-bodied whites in the winter. But again, for by the glass, it’s more about giving guests at least a few comfortable and familiar options. 

Bill: We somms all get into our nerdy boxes and think, this is super cool and super fun, but that doesn’t always work for the average consumer. I used to present the wine book to guests, they would take one look and close it and slide it back across the table. It was intimidating. 

Eric/Empire: Having a well-curated, smaller list can reap huge benefits in terms of staff familiarity and menu pairings. Larger lists are great, if the account has a staff that can sell the wines as well as have it make sense to the dining public. Having a behemoth list that only a few people on the floor on any given shift can discuss is not romancing diners. Overall, wine lists should have an ability to interact with the menu and not confuse the clientele.  

Randy: We wanted to create the least pretentious wine list in America at our restaurant L.O.A. on the Westside. You think that sounds impossible with 500 wine selections, but I’m from Atlanta so nothing is impossible! Our Champagne/Bubbles page says, “Because Champagne is never a bad idea.” Our Rosé page says, “Drink Pink,” because I hate it when men refuse to drink drinks that are a certain color! We have a “So Fresh and So Clean” page that is all the crisp clean whites. Our large format wines page says “Size matters.“  

The real people are not the 1%! They are the real people. You have to make it tongue in cheek to make people comfortable. Talk to people like the folks they are.  

Lara: So listening to your guests is obviously important. What other factors affect your choices of how many wines to list? 

Bill: I’m bound with certain mandates because of the corporate structure (The Sylvan is a Kimpton Hotel), but even for mandated items, I can put it anywhere I want to. For example, if a mandate comes to us featuring Jackson Family wines, we can choose anything from their portfolio, and we can list it at our cantina, in The Betty (our fine dining restaurant) or offer it for in-room dining. 

Janice: To me, the most important thing is to focus on wines that complement the restaurant’s style of food. Lazy Betty isn’t a steakhouse, so it doesn’t make sense to have a lot of in-your-face cabernets and voluptuous chardonnays. Our tasting menu tends to feature a lot of vegetables and seafood, so I prefer to focus on bright wines with lots of acidity. I’ve noticed a lot of our guests proclaim themselves to be only red wine drinkers, so I like to offer them light-bodied reds from cool and/or coastal areas. Beaujolais, Oregon pinots and Burgundy are easy sells that won’t steamroll the lighter items on the menu.  

Bill: You also really need to match your wine prices to your menu prices. If your average cost per person is $75, you aren’t going to sell wines in the $40 range! And if your plates are all under $30, you aren’t going to sell wine on the $400 page! I’ve found that our new sweet spot for wine is going to be $60-$80 bottles. People want more approachable, more economical choices … 60% of our list going in that direction, as I deplete inventory from the previous director’s list. 

We’ll keep 25% of our list in the $40-60 range. We all know that we make way better margins on these wines, but you have to sell a lot more of them to make the same money. Wines [at that price point] have to be work horses; you have to turn a lot of them. But then again, guests might buy two bottles, because they don’t think they have overspent the value. 

10% of our list stays in the range of $80-120, and 5% are very special occasion wines. 

Eric: I recall a dive bar I used to go to that had classic dive bar prices, and at the bottom of the beer list was a bottle of famous Champagne. The owner of the dive bar loved the Champagne brand and wanted to have it available. He sold maybe two bottles a year and kept no more than three on hand. This was as much for him as it was for anyone. At the same time, I have seen restaurants with expensive cuts of beef on the menu and wines that don’t match the price point of the menu. Everything on the list or in inventory should make sense to the restaurant’s business model.  

Jason/BoccaLupo: I worked for Kevin Rathbun Steak for about 10 years. Our list was crazy big, and I was crazy young to be doing that! We had a wine room, temperature control, the whole nine. We had a 50+ bottle Napa Cab list. Looking back, it was fun. But there isn’t a whole lot of value-added doing it that way. We are always trying to add value for those dining here [at BoccaLupo]. If people come in here and drop $200 for a meal for two, they may look back and think, that doesn’t feel worth 1/5 of my work week! Sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow. 

Lara: So perception of value has to be key. What about storage? I’ve been lucky enough in my career to manage wine programs stored in entire temperature-controlled rooms with proper rack shelving, which I could walk into and organize; wine programs stored in refrigerated built-in cabinets that made inventory a breeze; and wine programs stored in modular EuroCave cabinets on wheels that stored all bottles in easy view. But I’ve also managed wine programs with all wine displayed out on a countertop or stored in cardboard boxes under a staircase! Not everyone has the luxury of thoughtful storage. Tell me a little about how you store your wine inventory. 

Daniel/Osteria Mattone: The larger a wine list is, the more time, effort and expense it takes to maintain that list. Storage takes additional square footage, which adds cost that some restaurants can’t justify, or maybe they simply don’t have the time or people to maintain or organize a larger inventory of wine. 

Eric: A driving force should always be budget combined with storage. I see many accounts take on many more selections than they have space for, which leads to the account regularly running out of stock on certain wines. 

Bill: We took over a closet in the hotel, and the somm before me built bins, 32 across and 11 down, with a wall-mounted air unit. The cellar gets to 64 degrees, and then I also use the walk in. When I took over here, it was a mess. The book was a mess, the flow was off. It didn’t make sense to me, and it took me a minute to take everything out of the closet, redo the numbering system.  

I had to set up my cellar so if I wasn’t there, they could find a bottle. I set up the bins so they follow the wine list. An inventory system doesn’t make sense if it only makes sense to you. We all like to go on vacation!  

The new system really mitigated mistakes. If you have the same producer, different vineyards, or if you have different vintages of the same wine, and you grab the wrong bottle, it can be a costly mistake.  

Daniel: I will say that using bin numbers, with each individual wine identified by its own number, does allow for greater ease-of-use among the entire staff. This way any manager, server or bartender can locate a wine in the point-of-sale system and print out a ticket that leads them directly to that wine in the storage area.  Personally, however, I do miss the time I spent working with an entire team of sommeliers and navigating almost by pure memory lateral storage bins with hanging tags identifying the contents of each bin.  

Janice: We just finished our final service in our original Candler Park location and are in the throes of moving into a larger space in midtown. I’ll have the chance to essentially start our wine program from scratch, at least from an organizational perspective. I still don’t have a full picture of what it’s all going to look like because construction is on-going, but I know I’ll have wine storage on the floor and in rooms a few floors away. My biggest concern is making sure our organization system is conducive to smooth service. That means making it as easy as possible to find and reach any given bottle. I’ve learned clear labeling is key (on the bottle and the shelf), and it’s best to have a limited number of people involved in putting away and retrieving bottles. If too many people start moving wine around, things get jumbled fast. 

I’ve been asking for advice from colleagues: what would you do if you could start from scratch? A good one was about storing expensive bottles below waist height so they’re less likely to break if they fall! 

Jason: We do not chill any of our reds here. I would love to, but we work with what we’ve got. We get creative with storage, putting stuff under benches and stuff like that. 

I think holding wine at the temp our restaurant space gets to is fine. I am not super concerned with it. 

Janice: For five years, we’ve been housed in a small space with inadequate storage. The upside of that is it forces one to keep a list tight and well edited. The downside is not being able to take advantage of case deals because there’s literally nowhere to put a whole case!  

Lara: Yes! About that! How many of you make decisions for your list so you can take advantage of those case deals distributors offer? 

Bill: I like to start with just a couple of bottles of each wine. Yeah, it’s great to get a better price to get a case, but if I just have to pay a couple more dollars a bottle, it doesn’t always make sense. However, recently I was purchasing the Austin Hope Cabernet from Paso Robles and it came in at $47 by the bottle, but it was only $22 a bottle to buy it by the case. In that instance, it makes a lot of sense. At that price, on the list for $60-80, it sells itself.  

Daniel: We are fortunate to have enough space to take advantage of case deals on many of our wines, but if a restaurant is limited on space, sometimes it’s better to keep the list shorter so you have more room to take advantage of volume discounts. 

Jason: For almost all of our BTG wines [at BoccaLupo], we sell them at a really high volume. At Kevin Rathbun Steak, we sold more wine, but we sold more skus as well. We are really close to doing the same volume for the limited number of wines that we have. The fact that our list is small creates an exclusivity. Suppliers want to be on the list.  

Sometimes distributors will offer us a really good deal to put, say, four wines BTG on our list, and if they have a great portfolio I might be willing to do that. But some smaller distributors can’t afford to offer those deals. So, it’s a balance.  

Randy: I make a program, the suppliers and distributors stick to it. Every decision made by the supplier and the operators needs to benefit the guest. The dream is to have a great relationship with your distributors, but you have to be willing to have tough conversations with them to make sure the customers aren’t affected. 

Eric: A restaurant makes money when they sell something, but they make even more money when they make smart purchases. Something I teach to all of my sales representatives is to consider how impactful your career will be if you work with accounts and not against them. If I can offer an account a way to maximize their profits, then I’m making a good decision. When you are able to impact your profits from smart purchasing, you can help pay for the other parts of the program that don’t move with the same velocity as everything else. Why not maximize profit when it’s possible? 

Lara: Ok, final topic. We’ve written our list, we’ve gotten the best deals, we have everything put away where we can find it. Now how do we keep track of it all, and how do we inventory everything? I currently inventory my product using an accounting software called Compeat that isn’t specifically designed for wine lists, but it works just fine for our operations. We can count on a laptop or an iPad, and the values are updated for us every time a new invoice is received. I’ve also done inventory the old-fashioned way, with a printed spreadsheet and a clipboard, and honestly, I almost prefer it. What system do you use to manage your inventory? 

Bill: At our hotel, the policy is that the person who orders product can’t be the person who receives the product. I have an admin who receives deliveries for me, but I love to go down to the cellar; it’s my baby. I find the homes for everything.  

[As Janice mentioned earlier,] the bigger the program, the bigger the establishment, the more people you’ll need to have access to it. But if you can limit it, it will save you a lot of money. 

We have Bevager as the official inventory system for the hotel, and you can do inventory on your phone. I have my admin person who interacts with Bevager. But I am old school, and I do the count on my spreadsheet and then put it in. It’s a lot of extra work, but I like it and it works for me. Actually touching bottles is beneficial for me. 

My spreadsheet runs totals for me. For example, I know that I have $7,000 in Chardonnay, but I might have opportunities for growth in Pinot Noir. It helps me manage the categories as a way to micro-focus.  

Jason: I got an iPad back in 2014 or 2015 when I was running Kevin Rathbun Steak, and everyone made fun of me for being so young and techy! I am so not. But I love spreadsheets, and if I were to recommend anything to anyone it would be that. I am pretty stuck on not paying people for anything I can do on my own. Whether it’s 10 or 50 bottles. Counting bottles of wine is a hell of a lot easier than counting liquor!  

Instead of going around with an iPad, I print my spreadsheet out and go around doing the count. We do it monthly. We pay for a reservation system, for POS, but outside of that, you would be hard-pressed to convince me that there is anything we can’t do with Excel.  

Wine Pros 

• Bill Brillinger, sommelier and beverage director for three venues within The Sylvan Hotel in Buckhead, including restaurant The Betty
• Jason Furst, general manager of BoccaLupo in Inman Park, recipients of Atlanta’s first Exceptional Cocktails Award from the Michelin Guide
• Randy Hayden, beverage director for Slater Hospitality Group, which operates several unique concepts in Ponce City Market
• Daniel Pernice, co-owner and beverage director of Osteria Mattone in Roswell
• Janice Shiffler, wine director for Lazy Betty in Atlanta, which was one of five Atlanta restaurants to earn a Michelin star in 2023
• Eric Crane, training director for Empire Distributors, providing a distributor’s perspective

Lara Creasy is Beverage Director for Rocket Farm Restaurants, overseeing 12 Superica locations in five states. She loves all things beverage from tea to tequila, coffee to cocktails, whiskey to wine, and gets to make a living at it.