Dimwit question about finding wine

AJ Temple

AJ Temple

Location
Kent & Köln
Is there a simple and obvious solution to this that I am missing. In our small restaurant we store most of the wine in a couple of large fridges (for wine obviously) and some racks. Plus some cased in another area entirely (my private stuff supposedly). When people order wine - which they do all the time - my wife who runs FOH and our helper, really struggle to find it. There are about two to three hundred different wines, champagne, alco free etc and usually a few bottles at least of everything and I know where it all is but when we have guests in I'm always snowed under in the kitchen. I've hung parcel labels on everything but that doesn't seem to help them.

Additionally the style of the fridges means that the bottles sit in better if inserted neck first, so ideally I need some sort of system for marking or labelling the bottoms. For example last night we sold 14 bottles of various Rieslings from Germany Austria and Alsace, which to me are all quite different but the girls really struggled to locate them and they don't have the knowledge of what to look for re bottle shape etc.

I try to keep things organised by type so all rieslings are together, all champagnes are together and separate from other sparkling, all Bordeaux are separate from Burgundies....and so on. We don't have sequential numbers on our wine list, mainly because I'm still fiddling with the list and adding new things so the list has altered several times in recent weeks and will alter again today after a little buying spree.

I'm sure someone has a system I can copy. Ideas?
 
Yes, I know the list is much too long for our size in theory. But I have been collecting wines since I was 25 (quite some while ago) and have not put on the list even close to half of what I have in the cellars.

But there is no real harm it seems to me in having an extensive list. For example, I offer Petrus, Margaux, Lafite and Palmer etc, and I will not drink them all myself in the years I (possibly) have left to live. So I may as well put them on the list. We stock very high quality German and Austrian wines that basically cost us next to nothing due to family connections (vineyard owners). There is no need to reduce the list size as we have the wine anyway and we have a cellar at the family farm and at my wife's house in Germany that is not even listed.

The issue is not the range of wines available as I don't care all that much if people buy them or not as I bought them for me, not to sell. The issue is a system for finding them when guests order.
 
There is no number on the wine list - as previously explained.
It doesn't seem to me sensible to reduce the number of wines on the list - what is the advantage in that?
On Friday lunchtime for example we sold a bottle of Margaux 2005. This was more expensive than the entire menu for the table of six businessmen who bought it. It was priced far below what a Michelin restaurant would charge (and the guests knew that) and far above what I paid when I bought six cases EP (for my own consumption).

It seems daft to me to reduce the list. We just need a search and locate system. There must be some labelling method - it's just my ignorance.

For example, we have on our dessert wine list a few Sauternes, Barsacs and some other things at quite cheap prices and also Y'quem 1988 and others in a couple of vintages at quite a lot more (many multiples). We've only sold one half bottle, but it was at over 20 times what I bought them for 30 odd years ago and was still really cheap compared with typical restaurants. The lady who ordered it thought it was a bargain. It will not appeal to very many people, I accept, but why not list it?
 
In our small wine shop we have about 100-120 references arranged over 4 shelves.

We keep 3-4 of each reference in the two large wine fridges. There are six shelves in each.

The first half of the first display shelf is on the first fridge shelf, the second half on the second. Etc. The maths doesn’t work exactly but more or less.

It’s not rocket science but I only recall selling the wrong bottle once (an auslese instead of a Kabinett).
 
AJ Temple said:
There is no number on the wine list - as previously explained.
It doesn't seem to me sensible to reduce the number of wines on the list - what is the advantage in that?
On Friday lunchtime for example we sold a bottle of Margaux 2005. This was more expensive than the entire menu for the table of six businessmen who bought it. It was priced far below what a Michelin restaurant would charge (and the guests knew that) and far above what I paid when I bought six cases EP (for my own consumption).

It seems daft to me to reduce the list. We just need a search and locate system. There must be some labelling method - it's just my ignorance.

For example, we have on our dessert wine list a few Sauternes, Barsacs and some other things at quite cheap prices and also Y'quem 1988 and others in a couple of vintages at quite a lot more (many multiples). We've only sold one half bottle, but it was at over 20 times what I bought them for 30 odd years ago and was still really cheap compared with typical restaurants. The lady who ordered it thought it was a bargain. It will not appeal to very many people, I accept, but why not list it?
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I agree about the size of the list not being a particular problem - as long as you can find the wines!

I get that the wines aren’t numbered on the customer list. But perhaps you could have a master version with numbering that could be referred to by the wait staff when getting the bottle. The numbers don’t need to be sequential necessarily, that way. You just add another number when you add a new wine. Then you could use the previously suggested idea of a discreet numbering in the punt of the bottle. As long as the staff know what’s been ordered, that should work. And if they don’t, well, nothing can fix that!
 
Thanks all. I had not realised that chinagraph will write on glass. I like the idea of a master list for the team here that has numbers. It takes me ages on the computer to alter the list that people see (its formatted as a hidden table in MS Word so there is a lot of fiddling with adding and deleting rows). But I could experiment with a numbering system on Excel and also use it as a stock list, and rack the bottles according to that - then it doesn't matter keeping similar styles or regions physically together. We definitely need to do something as last night the girls struggled to find a wine the customers ordered and ended up selling something else.
 
Attempt at a sensible answer

I understand why you might wish to keep your length of list. The only solution for finding them is that every location can be identified by letter/number and that there is a master list which is updated every time you add, subtract or move a bottle, or at least before the next service. A very significant amount of work but should make finding easier and time lapse during service shorter.

the less sensible suggestion refers to what we did in the early days of Morris & Verdin when all staff members, male and female, were cricket enthusiasts. One spot was designated the wicket and the stacks of cases (admittedly, not individual bottles) could be referred to by their fielding locations (That Meursault is at wide mid-off for example)
 
AJ Temple said:
Yes, I know the list is much too long for our size in theory. But I have been collecting wines since I was 25 (quite some while ago) and have not put on the list even close to half of what I have in the cellars.

But there is no real harm it seems to me in having an extensive list. For example, I offer Petrus, Margaux, Lafite and Palmer etc, and I will not drink them all myself in the years I (possibly) have left to live. So I may as well put them on the list. We stock very high quality German and Austrian wines that basically cost us next to nothing due to family connections (vineyard owners). There is no need to reduce the list size as we have the wine anyway and we have a cellar at the family farm and at my wife's house in Germany that is not even listed.

The issue is not the range of wines available as I don't care all that much if people buy them or not as I bought them for me, not to sell. The issue is a system for finding them when guests order.
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What does your wife say?
 
Jonathan Hesford said:
What does your wife say?
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She doesn't care - she just wants a system where she can find things. She knows not to disturb the old fine wines. She likes running the restaurant and our other things, but she has no personal interest in wine as she doesn't drink alcohol, except for a glass of sauternes once a year at Christmas. Even though her family have a vineyard, and her cousins are in the wine trade as well, she has never paid attention to wine, bottle shapes, wine regions etc. She's picking it up now but in practice as we are an open kitchen if guests want wine advice or a food pairing they just ask me.
 
We once had a bemusing experience at a fancy (small) restaurant in NYC when, after ordering a wine, the sommelier disappeared for a very long time and then reemerged with a bandaged cut on his head and a completely different bottle of wine that he said would be a good substitute. Sadly it was not. (My wife wrote about the experience on Chowhound and the restaurant kindly invited us back for a free dinner.) Reading this thread, I now realise they must have had a bad system for arranging their wines!
 
Jasper Morris said:
The only solution for finding them is that every location can be identified by letter/number and that there is a master list which is updated every time you add, subtract or move a bottle, or at least before the next service.
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Absolutely, but I would say it is far better to update the list on the fly. Otherwise you will have to note the bottles removed, added and moved somewhere else, and then update the list, which will result in more errors.

The key in all this is to make it easy to update the list, so it gets done. Software of some sort would be needed, with a quick and easy (and fool-proof!) way of removing bottles at least, as that is what you would need to do during service. Regular backing-up of the list (i.e. taking copies that you keep indefinitely) is essential, and would not be difficult to set up. And do stock-takes every now and then, as errors will inevitably creep in.

Beyond that, automatic logging changes of would be great, so you can quickly see updates in any time period - bottles sold in each service for example. You might also consider using the list to generate wine lists, paper or electronic, for your customers to browse.
 
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I like the chinagraph pencil idea. "Save as" your text from your microsoft table to a text file ( .txt IIRC) then import that data to excel using a space as the data separator in the import menu, should be quite straightforward. I am pretty sure the data will be much easier to manage in an excel spreadsheet.
 
AJ Temple said:
She doesn't care - she just wants a system where she can find things. She knows not to disturb the old fine wines. She likes running the restaurant and our other things, but she has no personal interest in wine as she doesn't drink alcohol, except for a glass of sauternes once a year at Christmas. Even though her family have a vineyard, and her cousins are in the wine trade as well, she has never paid attention to wine, bottle shapes, wine regions etc. She's picking it up now but in practice as we are an open kitchen if guests want wine advice or a food pairing they just ask me.
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at the risk of antagonising the situation have you asked her what system she thinks would work best?
 
Yes. She doesn't mind. She is trained in logistics as it happens so is super familiar with complex warehousing systems and duty systems, but all we need is an index and something that will help her do the bill.

Anyway, following advice above, I have now ditched the MS Word wine list and stuck the whole lot in Excel. This will be used to present the customer wine list from now on, and will be on the laptop on the service desk where columns that customers don't see will be available. This will give stock levels, what I paid for it, some notes from tasting, possibly what food it goes well with. Each section of the list gets a descriptive letter- eg the highly imaginative C for champagne and every wine now has a number under that letter. So if a customer orders a C10 they get a vintage M&C for example. The spreadsheet has pivot tables that will also allow a direct import onto the customer bill as we don't have a POS system (we don't need one). The storage area will get the same numbering system on the bottles. Chinagraph didn't work well for anything in the fridges, so now each bottle will get a small food label on the bottom with the number. These stick to anything, even if a bit moist. The list has been re-organised by type of wine instead of by country, and I have ditched arranging things in price order as it is too much of a pain to re-arrange the list every time we add something or sell out.

I'm going to extend it to the farm cellar and the Koln cellar as well, so that we have a full record in one place, instead of my ancient had written stock books and tasting notes.

I have zero past experience of organising wine list and it is definitely a compromise as the variables of grape, region, country, price, character etc can conflict. It's a learning curve and having researched it a bit today, clearly sommeliers adopt different approaches to restaurant lists. It's interesting though as my own cellar is pretty much entirely fine wines, whereas I have now added things like Malbec which I don't really buy for myself but people frequently order it and primitivo (zinfandel) which is very popular, and a number of interesting but sensibly priced wines from unusual (to me) places.

Thanks all for the help and advice.
 
I have approximately 600 bottles of wine spread across 5 racks in different locations. Many of them singles. I have an spreadsheet with the names of the wines in vintage order and location. So one rack is called office and a to g along the top 1-8 down the side. So a wine will have location Office G4 on the spread sheet.
Your team just needs to access the spread sheet to quickly find the wine. The time consuming part is filling out the location on the spreadsheet in the first place.
 
Thanks. Jonathan. Yes as posted above I've switched the whole thing to Excel. I don't actually know how many bottles we have across the dispersed locations but it won't take long to catalogue the ones at the restaurant, though its probably a few more than I admitted to :cool: It will take much longer to transfer my manual records and might require the engagement of a teenager to assist. ;)

I've set up a pivot table to help organise the data, so we will be able to organise by various fields at the push of a button: region, age, alcohol, price, time in stock, drinking window, grape variety, margin, stock level etc. The main benefit though is we can use the laptop list to export directly into the bill. Hopefully I will be able to use the same table to do an export into software from which we can print an updated pretty list for guests. My wife likes Canva Pro so I will have to investigate that a bit more.
 
Simon Wheeler said:
Cellar tracker ?
You can list wines by location and bin/shelf, it also has a wine list lay out function
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Sorry Simon. I actually missed this but have had a look. Because of my past it is quick and easy for me to build my own database and I am then not dependent on US hosting and have no cost. I can also do things that Cellar tracker doesn't do (I think) such as direct web transfer, export to customer bill and benchmarking my list and prices against other restaurants. Once I got my head around automating the list and ditching Word, it's a pretty simple database.
 
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