Welcome back, restaurants: Please let wine drinkers help you return to normal

Five suggestions to increase restaurant wine revenue and make wine drinkers happy

Dear restaurant business:

I know we haven’t always been on the best of terms, given restaurant wine prices. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want restaurants to recover as we begin to come out of the pandemic. Because I do understand how bad the past year has been – in jobs and store closings, as well as $27 billion in lost sales.

And, despite our differences, we both understand that restaurants and wine are part of each other – when one suffers, we both do. So please, don’t exclude wine drinkers as the recovery begins. Let us help you:

• Don’t take us for granted, and assume we’ll be back just because. Because we may not be. Many of us discovered that home cooking isn’t as bad as we thought it was.

• Keep experimenting. Many operators tried something different during the pandemic, and much of it worked out quite well. Or, as one Texas restaurant official told me about cocktails to go: “How do we help to provide opportunities for restaurants, and especially since what looked like it was going to be a two-week crisis has turned into 10 months? This was a way to do that.” So why stop experimenting now?

• Meet us halfway on pricing. Why expect the old rules from the old normal to be relevant given all that has happened? So consider (where legal) offering wine bottle discounts. Or (again, where legal) buying two or three glasses to get the next one free. Or even cutting wine markups from 3- and 4-to-1 to 2- and 1½-to-1. As noted on the blog many times before, this can bring in thousands of dollars of revenue that would otherwise be left on the storeroom shelf.

• BYOB is an opportunity to regain customer loyalty and trust, and not – as some complain – lost revenue. What better way to win back those of us who enjoy drinking wine with dinner than to let us bring it to your restaurant? We would be happy to pay the corkage fee, and you’re getting two or three or four people at the table who might otherwise stay home.

• Shake up the wine list. Offer us something that we haven’t seen at the supermarket or Drizly or a chain retailer. This is an opportunity to replace the wholesaler-driven, Big Wine brands that you use because it’s easy, with wine that’s interesting and different. Which is how you think about your food, isn’t it?

As always, let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.

Your pal,
The Wine Curmudgeon

Photo: “Restaurant tables” by TChapman9 is licensed under CC BY 2.0