Late August is a unique time in the wine sales and retail game. It’s a moment for a pause, a final vacation, a little breath before September rolls in. It’s also a great time to ask what is missing and start to work to fix it before the busy season hits. For a sales rep, Read More…
Category: Restaurants
Today is different than tomorrow (end of a quarter)
Today is the last day of Q1. It’s a much different day than tomorrow, the start of Q2. What do you do today vs. tomorrow as a wine sales rep, restaurant owner/manager, or retailer? Today, you work super hard. You push for the final sprint ahead of the finish line. You make that extra sales Read More…
Know your history (and that things change)
The history of wine trends, facts, and fads is always good to keep in mind, mainly to recognize that some trends grow roots and stick, white others blow away with the wind. The sands shift with the tides. For those relatively new to the wine business (be it wholesale, restaurant, or retail) here are some Read More…
Your Wine Onboarding
When your organization hires a new employee, they have obviously been vetted a bit and know something about wine. But where they fall on that spectrum varies for each hire. So does your company: Sit down with them, taste through a bunch of wines, get some input from them, learn how they describe the wines Read More…
Selling Wine vs. Taking An Order
You sell wine when you guide the process, when you frame choices for the customer, and when you present options (paths) that lead to the company’s (and your) ultimate goals. You are an order taker when the customer is the guide, when the customer frames the choices, and when the customer presents the paths that Read More…
More is not better (focus on focus)
A wine by the glass list that is 90 items long is confounding for the customer (and impossible to train a service staff on, much less preserve the quality in the bottle). A Chardonnay section in a wine shop that has three times as many wines as the other sections is obviously trying to appeal Read More…
A super simple restaurant wine training hack
The upended labor market due to the pandemic is making for stressful times to be a restaurant owner. Trying to find qualified labor, good and communicative people to work the front of the house, is more difficult than ever. This leads to hiring people that might not have been hired before, with less knowledge and Read More…
Calm waters and making waves
Swimming in the calm waters is easy. It’s fun. It’s what everyone wants to do. Swimming in the waves is harder, it’s challenging. It’s demanding. It’s not what everyone seeks out. It takes a special type of person to seek out the waves. And then there are the wave creators. The ones that make the Read More…
Free is never free
Freebies abound in the liquor industry. Look at the umbrellas on the patios, the credit card embossed checkout books, the logos on the beer mugs. And behind the scenes, free cases are delivered to retailers. Free menu printing, or covering the costs for someone else to do it, is a regular offer for restaurants. And Read More…
Wine Inventory as Wine Marketing
Inventory is one of the most mis-understood aspects of the wine world. A wholesaler that commits ten percent of their annual revenue to a single purchase of five thousand cases of Hungarian Viognier is going to run into an inventory problem. A restaurant owner who has a wine buyer that overbuys on Barolo and ties Read More…
When things go wrong
In the relationship between a wholesaler and a retailer or restaurant, things will go wrong. It’s just a matter of time. A forgotten invoice. A screwed up delivery. A change of vintage from the 95 point wine everyone wants to the new vintage, which is only 85 points. Or something bigger. A shift in the Read More…
A very special case: having the whole wine list
To own the entire wine list at a restaurant, wether it’s a coffee café that happens to pour a couple of house wines at night, or the hot new restaurant with the hot new chef that is packed every evening, is a very particular situation that deserves a different playbook. A few thoughts: You’re a Read More…
You’ve made the choice
If you’re a wine retailer, you’ve made the choice to not have Memorial Day or Labor Day off. You made the choice to work weekends. You’ve made the choice to be in one spot, waiting for customers to come to you. You made the choice to know that every New Year’s Eve, the day before Read More…
Wine and Bagless Vacuum Cleaners
Bagless vaccum cleaners don’t perform their job as well as the old-school cleaner with a bag that you toss out when full. This has been proven time and time again and is the advice you hear if you go to a good vacuum cleaner repair shop and ask. But for most people that buy bagless vacuum Read More…
Ideas (for restaurants)
Have a restaurant that wants to move more wine, or attract more of the serious wine crowd? Here are some ideas. Half price wine night – Can be a weekly event for one month, or keep it going all year long. Pick the slowest wine night of the week and do 50% off all bottles. Read More…