MAXIMISING WINE SALES

The demand for wine is growing and provides you with an excellent opportunity to build your business. Every pub can sell wine and the majority of pubs can sell a lot more by following the simple but effective techniques explained here:

Learn about wine

Take time to learn a little about wine. The websites mentioned earlier provide you with lots of useful information about wine; there are many other websites and books that can help improve your understanding of the subject. Learning about wine builds your knowledge and confidence and is also fun. Don’t just learn the theory; make sure that you know what each of the wines you stock tastes like too!

Train your staff

It is just as important for your staff to have knowledge of the wine and the wines you stock. They should be able to describe to customers the types of wine you have available and their characteristics. Neither you, nor your staff, need to be experts, but a basic understanding, which enables you to explain your wine range to customers and perhaps make recommendations, is important.

Ask your wine supplier to teach you and your staff something about wine by running a short wine tasting as part of your staff training sessions. Make sure new staff are trained to understand wine and are able to serve it correctly and confidently to customers.

Match your knowledge to your clientele

Your public house may require you to have more than just a basic knowledge of wine. For example, food pubs and pubs with a high demand for better quality wines. In these situations, you will have to develop your wine knowledge in order to fully exploit the opportunity to sell wine. You can increase your understanding of wine through research, reading, supplier tuition and by gaining qualifications or attending courses. (The Wines and Spirit Education Trust mentioned earlier in this chapter offers courses and qualifications.)

Have a ‘wine champion’

The role of ‘wine champion’ is to make wine a priority in your pub with the aim of maximising the sales of wine. This person could be you, or someone else you have appointed with an interest in wine. They will oversee all aspects of promoting wine to customers and ensure that all staff are adequately trained.

Match your wine range to your clientele

Your range of wines should meet the needs of your customers. Waverley TSB, a subsidiary of Scottish and Newcastle, uses an interesting way of segmenting the wine market: Six Faces of the Wine Drinker. These describe the 6 types of wine drinker and their main characteristics:

1 The ‘Classic Connoisseur’

• Older.
• Knowledgeable.
• Identified with Old World wines.
• Traditional styles and tastes.

2 The ‘Enthusiast’

• Buys into traditional image of wine.
• Lacks knowledge.
• Relates price to quality.
• Prefers Old World.

3 The ‘Entertainer’

• Drinks wine at family occasions, with or without food.
• Adventurous, likes New World wines.
• Price-conscious.
• Trades up when entertaining friends.

4 The ‘Easily Pleased’

• Older, usually female.
• Unpretentious.
• Drinks cheaper, sweeter wines.
• Does not experiment.

5 The ‘Adventurer’

• Self confident.
• Enjoys experimenting.
• Doesn’t have detailed wine knowledge.
• Tends towards New World wines.

6 The ‘Chardonnay Girl’

• Younger female.
• Prefers white wine for social drinking.
• Open to experiment.
• Wide drinks repertoire.

You can use the above types to help clarify what sort of wine drinkers use your pub or who you are aiming to attract. This can then be used as a basis for deciding which types of wines to stock.

You should also consider the kind of occasions when your customers will want to drink wine in your pub. For example:

• Drinking wine by the glass in a ‘round’.
• Having a meal.
• Ordering wine by the bottle to share.
• Celebrating a special occasion with ‘bubbly’.

If you provide food, the type of menu you offer will influence your wine range. An extensive menu and high quality food offering will require a comprehensive wine range that complements your menu. You will need a good knowledge of wine yourself, or assistance from your wine supplier or chef in order to put together a good wine list in this case.

If yours is a pub where wine sales have been historically low or your clientele appear to have a very limited knowledge of wine, offer a smaller range of wines, focusing on the more popular brands and grape varieties. This allows your customers to recognise these wines and gives them the confidence to order them from you.

Make wine visible!

The largest barrier to wine sales in pubs is lack of visibility, so making your customers aware that you sell wine will automatically increase sales. Make your wines visible to your customers by having:

• Wine displayed in your back-bar area.
• Wine racks and glass fronted wine coolers.
• Chalkboards.
• Table-top ‘tent cards’.
• A professional–looking wine list.

For traditional pubs offering a simplified wine range, offering wine by the glass, you could have:

• Wine cabinets (display units which can be obtained from certain wine suppliers).
• Draught wine with well-positioned dispense units (normally arranged via your brewery or pub company).

Glassware

Wine appreciation involves all the senses, and the glassware you use will influence the aroma, sight and taste of wine. Here are some basic requirements, when choosing glassware for wine:

• Use only plain and clear glassware.
• Ensure it has a stem.
• Use glassware that tapers towards the top.

Two or three types of glassware are normally sufficient for the majority of pubs:

• Champagne/sparkling wine – a ‘flute’ or similar.
• Red wine – glass with a large bowl.
• White wine – glass with a smaller bowl.

Glass size:

Trading Standards legislation dictates that still wine, if sold by the glass, must be served in quantities of 125ml or 175ml or multiples of these. (Bottles or carafes of wine must be sold in quantities of 25cl, 50cl, 75cl, 1 litre, or multiples of these.) Wine served by the glass must be measured using a Government stamped ‘thimble’ measure, or dispensed using a Government stamped glass.

An excellent way of improving your wines sales is to use 2 sizes of wine glass

• 175ml – as your normal or standard size,

and

• 250ml – as your large or premium size.

The 125ml wine glass is now regarded as outdated and is perceived as not offering value for money by customers. Making your standard wine glass 175ml means that you sell an extra 40% of wine each time someone makes a standard purchase, compared with a 125ml glass.

Serve wine at the right temperature

Serving wine at the right temperature is crucial as this affects its taste. The general principle of serving red wine at room temperature and serving white wines chilled should be followed. You can purchase digital thermometer ‘bottle collars’ to check the temperature of your wine.

Red wine served too cold makes it taste too tannic (a dry, mouth-puckering sensation) or acidic; and served too warm can make it taste flat and lifeless. White wine served too warm will taste alcoholic and flabby (lacking acidity), while white wines served too cold will be refreshing but nearly tasteless. Here are some guidelines for serving wine at the correct temperature:

Wine type:	Ideal serving temperature °C	Ideal serving temperature °F
Most red wines	16° to 18°C	62° to 65°F
Light fruity reds (eg Beaujolais)	14° to 15.5°C	58° to 60°F
Fine dry white wines	14° to 16.5°C	58° to 62°F
Quaffing white wines	10° to 12.8°C	50° to 55°F
Champagne and sparkling wines	7°C	45°F

Pricing wine

Most pub customers are not willing to pay excessive prices for their wine on a normal drinking occasion. Today’s wine drinkers are aware of the supermarket prices of wines and can gauge your prices against these. The majority of pub wine drinkers want good value, good quality wine that can be quaffed with partners or friends. (Even though at other times, such as special occasions or during a high quality meal, they may be willing to pay more for their wine.) Pricing pub wine too highly forces customers to choose the cheapest wine available, switch to other types of drinks or encourages them to seek out other pubs offering wine at more reasonable prices.

When pricing your wine, the cash margin approach is a useful alternative to the percentage margin method (which can result in high selling prices). The cash margin approach works by adding a set cash amount to the cost price you pay for your wines in order to calculate your selling price. The two pricing approaches are compared in the tables below:

(£) Cash margin approach
Cost price per bottle (ex VAT)	Cash margin applied	Selling price per bottle (ex VAT)
£ 3.00	£ 3.00	£ 6.00
£ 5.00	£ 3.00	£ 8.00
£ 7.00	£ 3.00	£ 10.00

Note: Champagne and other top quality wines will have a higher cash margin applied in order to set your selling price of these products.

(%) Percentage margin approach
Cost price per bottle (ex VAT)	% margin applied	Selling price per bottle (ex VAT)
£3.00	70%	£5.10
£5.00	70%	£8.50
£7.00	70%	£11.90

Applying the cash margin approach has the effect of reducing the selling prices of your higher priced wines that encourages customers to trade up and purchase them. They perceive this as being given more choice and offered better value for money.

The aim of the cash margin approach is to increase your cash profits by encouraging customers to make more wine purchases that will compensate for the loss in your wine percentage profit margin. The adage ‘You bank pound notes; you don’t bank percentage margins’ applies here.

More ways to promote wine

There are many other ways to promote wine in your pub. Here are some more ideas:

• Run wine tastings.
• Set up a wine club.
• Offer a ‘wine of the month’.
• Run special offers (eg buy 2 glasses and get the rest of the bottle free).
• Link wine with your menu (food pubs).
• Promote seasonal wines (eg refreshing white wines for summer and full-bodied reds as ‘winter warmers’).
• Promote wine during special events (eg Champagne and strawberries during Wimbledon).
• Promote particular wines by linking them to ‘fun nights’ (eg ‘French nights’ promoting French wines, or ‘Beach parties’ promoting Californian wines, etc).