Advocating wineby the glass
MORE and more establishments, pubs in particular, are abandoning the forlorn and oxidised bottles of white and red wine behind the bar. Instead, ranges of up to 20 wines, and sometimes more, are actively promoted in the bar area and on special lists.
Caterer's campaign to encourage restaurants and pubs to offer a choice of quality wine by the glass is adding daily to my mailbag with examples of successful wine promotion.
The latest correspondent is Clive Walker, proprietor of the Castle Inn, Lydford, Okehampton, Devon. In the three years that Walker has owned the eight-bedroomed hotel and restaurant, he has refurbished the rooms, improved the menu and expanded the wine list. Food is an important part of the business, with the restaurant accounting for 50% of turnover, wet sales 30% and rooms and sundries 20%.
In the summer when business intensified, Walker was especially keen to sell a range of wines by the glass. He saw it as a means of increasing sales and helping customers to appreciate the improved restaurant and bar snack menu, and in the long run of selling more food. He believed too that the opportunity to experiment with a range of wines, some of which are unfamiliar to them, would encourage customers to return and to graduate to bottles once they came to know a wine.
Walker's approach to the project as a whole makes a useful case study in itself.
To keep the wines fresh, he introduced six wines for sale by the glass and used the manual Vac-U-Vin system. For those who don't know it, this consists of a hand pump about the size of a corkscrew and stopper valves which allow air to be withdrawn leaving a vacuum above the level of the wine. It is widely available from wine merchants and costs less than £10.
The disadvantage of the system, which is ideal for careful domestic use, is that if you over-pump you can disturb the surface of the wine and affect its quality while creating the vacuum. Walker found this system kept wines fresh for five to seven days, but after that they started to deteriorate.
Sales during the summer were so good that Walker decided to take on the Verre de Vin electronically controlled quality-saving system on a trial basis over a six-week period and increased the range of wines to 12. Initially Walker felt he could not justify the system on grounds of cost. But in winter when sales entered a seasonal decline: "We started to lose bottles owing to deterioration once they had been opened." At the same time, the success of the wine-by-the-glass philosophy had paid off in the shape of a wine symbol in the Good Pub Guide.
The result was a return to the Verre de Vin system despite its cost of more than £2,000. The advantages were the ability to keep still wines for up to three weeks and sparkling wines for seven days, and to be able to offer more wines by the glass at one time. Paying for the system is meanwhile proving less of a problem than anticipated. Though the Castle allows six glasses to the bottle, it pays for the system by charging a fifth of the bottle price.
"Also," says Walker, "we have found that most people are tempted to trade up to a better wine from the usual range of house wines."
Customer confidence is important. "Our customers know that they will be drinking a wine that has been kept in good condition."
Walker has recognised the importance of staff training and involvement. The 16 staff at the Castle are encouraged to taste the wine which they sell and know how to describe it. o
