6 Ways To Sell More Wine

20 November 2024 - Inn Express

Wine is imperative to a bar or restaurant’s offering, it’s important to lean into the category and do all you can to sell more. Whether you’re a fine dining restaurant or a small local pub, wine is another avenue to boost your revenue.

A Well Curated List

A well curated list could mean different things to different people, we believe it’s about finding the right balance between variety and accessibility. You want to offer a range of options, different origins and different price points. Making it accessible and appealing for lots of different customers. When we design wine menus for our customers, sometimes we group the wines by flavour profiles. Instead of listing all the white wines in one go, we will list them under subcategories e.g. fresh and fruity white wine, bright and crisp white wine etc.

Train your staff

If you don’t train your staff about wine, they won’t mention it, let alone give their recommendations and upsell it. Give them the confidence to talk about wine with customers and make educated suggestions about food pairings and the type of wines that suit what the customer is looking for.

They could learn about the current wine list, memorise which wine compliments which dish and how to inform the customer of the flavour profiles and aromas. Some customers would like a simple explanation, while others will know the advanced terminology of the wine world. Having staff that can adapt to these different types of wine customers is extremely beneficial.

Bonus tip – the staff members that know their stuff can start to steer customers towards the wines that have higher margin. Allowing you to sell more wine, with more revenue.

Glass And Bottle Pricing Strategy

Some customers won’t want to buy a full bottle, it’s too much of a commitment and the price tag often scares them. We need to make it attractive to the customer to buy the bottle and provide an incentive. That incentive in this case will be pricing the bottle slightly cheaper than three 250ml glasses. This way they understand that buying the bottle will save them money compared the buying the same volume in glasses.

You’ll often see bars or restaurants sell the expensive wines by the bottle, this reduces waste of the expensive wines. However, if you were to use a Coravin system that keeps the wine fresh, you can start to sell expensive wines by the glass. Many customers may want to taste those wines but won’t want to commit to a full bottle. A coravin system is a great solution for this issue.

Host Wine Events

Although it sounds obvious, a wine event is a great way to sell more wine. If you bring customers to your venue in the name of wine, expect to sell, sell, sell.

Some wine events you could consider hosting are:

• Wine tastings – this gives customers the opportunity to taste lots of wine without investing heavily. Once you have multiple customers tasting the same wine, you’ll go through the bottles quickly. Plus, you can charge a slight premium for the variety of wines the customers are going to taste.
• Wine pairing dinners – design a dinner and wine pairing menu, you can calculate how much wine you will use too so there will be little to no waste!
• Happy hour – there’s no harm in picking a night in the week that’s usually quiet and having a wine offer such as ‘Wine Wednesdays’.

Focus on your presentation

Customers are going to be more likely to choose wine at your venue if your presentation is great. There are several ways you can achieve this.

One is to serve the glasses at the right temperature, you must also use proper glassware. These two are very basic but essential.

How you serve the wine is also important. Create a table side experience for the customer, talk about the wine and offer to coach them through it.

These small details will make you stand out as a go to wine venue in the area.

Upselling with other items

You can leverage other items to sell more wine. For example, you can offer a discounted bottle price when customers order a certain dish. If someone is on the fence about which drink should accompany their meal, this may push them to the side of wine.

We hope we have helped you in your pursuit of selling more wine, here at Inn Express we have two wine experts that will be more than happy to help you further. Open an account with us today and get started!