Last year we decided to take a snapshot
of wine service around the country by surveying the people
on the frontline: sommeliers, beverage directors, and managers;
here are the results. Wine sales seem to be in a state of
flux; the heady indulgence of the 90s has faded, but professionalism
in wine service seems to have reached a new level. Training
and knowledge are high, and guests are responding by being
more open - as well as being more interested in value. Here
are the numbers:
Who
You Are:
Our respondents worked all
across the country, with California dominating at 25%. 70%
of you carried the title of Sommelier or Wine Director, occasionally
– 12% of the time – in conjunction with a broader
management title. Other respondents identified themselves
primarily as either the General Manager or Owner of the restaurant.
If you’re looking
to join the wine service industry, get out there and schmooze:
60% of our respondents indicated they got their job through
“Connections.” The other way to get in is to move
up; 20% of you were promoted internally. Internal promotions
were especially common in the South, where 56% moved up from
other work on the floor. The Internet has apparently not caught
on for wine service hiring yet, with only 1% of you having
found a job this way. It seems the wine service industry remains
small and close-knit enough for personal relationships to
dominate hiring decisions.
Wine service positions seem
relatively stable: almost a third of respondents have been
in their current position for over 6 years, with another third
there for three to six years. Similarly, 63% have been in
the beverage industry for over ten years. The Northeast seems
to be the place for newer faces; twice as many New Englanders
than the national average indicated they had been in beverage
service for just two to five years. 42% of you have spent
an average of 3 to 6 years at a single establishment before
moving on; about one quarter have been more restless and spent
an average of only one to three years at each establishment.
The idea of the tipped sommelier
working the floor seems to have all but disappeared; less
than 10% of you work hourly in conjunction with tips. Excluding
General Managers and Owners, the average reported salary was
$52,700, with responses ranging widely from $25K up to $100K.
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Where
You Learned:
A full two-thirds of you
indicated you had received some sort of formal wine training;
this was highest in New York City (85%) and California (73%)
but lowest in the Northeast, where only one-third had done
so. The Court of Master Sommeliers looms large, having trained
40% of you to one degree or another; wine training as part
of an undergraduate degree also shows prominently. Many of
the other programs reflect where their classes are available;
the American Sommelier Association, for example, is based
in New York, and almost all of you who indicated that you
had taken an ASA class worked in New York City or the Northeast.
Of the third nationwide
who had not received formal training, more than half indicated
they considered themselves self-taught. The rest are split
primarily between on-the-job training and the influence of
a mentor, with a small number indicating that a study group
played an important part of their wine education.
Whatever your educational
background in wine, many of you – 40.5% - felt no need
to pursue formal training in the future. Of those that did
wish to do so, the initials “MS” loom large and
are more than four times more popular than its nearest competitor,
the MW program.
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Your
Work and the Winelist:
On the whole, you spend
a third of your time talking to guests. Selecting wines and
talking with salespeople also weigh significantly on your
schedule. Most of you – 69% - are apparently too busy
for outside work, but some teach, often for one of the various
programs mentioned previously, and 13% of you consult for
your guests on stocking their private cellars.
42% have building the winelist
to yourself, while 28.5% have other wine colleagues to collaborate
with. Restauranteurs put their finger in the pie one-fifth
of the time, but chefs do not seem terribly interested –
only 7.5% of you said the chef played an active part in selecting
wines.
Price, Menu Compatibility,
and Quality – especially quality – are the main
factors for you in selecting a wine for your lists. Finding
something unusual is a factor 11% of the time, but those who
indicated this was important often did so quite emphatically.
Once a wine gets on the
list, it’s likely to be placed in a fairly traditional
format by region or varietal; only 39% of you felt that your
winelist was organized less than conventionally. Generally
the “less conventional” aspect was some form of
“Featured” or “Sommelier’s”
picks, sometimes with a focus on value wines. This question
actually evoked some strong feelings; one wine director responded
“Tradition is often user-friendly if your customers
aren’t rubes. This is a question for journalist’s
amusement: “Top Picks” is insulting and pretentious
in a WTC restaurant!” But sometimes this conservatism
was on the guests’ part: a sommelier in the Northeast
was itching to reorganize their list according to flavor components,
but felt, “our clientele may get a little freaked out.”
How would they feel about the restaurant in California that
invites guests in to the cellar to select a bottle directly
off the shelf?
About 10% offer an unusually
large number of wines by the glass; contrariwise, about 3%
offered just a few, sometimes because you promote half-bottles
as an alternative. A similarly small group (2%) felt that
finding exclusive wines for your by-the-glass list was a priority.
Generally choosing wines to serve by-the-glass seems to be
a balance of price and quality – a quest for value.
Getting a wine to move appears
to be largely a matter of staff training and tasting; two-thirds
of our respondents felt this was to best way to promote a
wine – some even recommend creating staff incentives
to move certain wines. Focusing on a wine’s pairing
potential – especially as part of a tasting menu –
and placing the wine in a prominent part of the winelist also
seem to be priorities when trying to move an individual wine.
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Practical
Matters:
A surprising third of you
have what are apparently easy jobs, reporting no problems
or challenges in your work. The rest of you probably look
forward to robots becoming part of the restaurant work force:
60% of your reported challenges center on staffing in one
way or another – mostly on training. 4% mentioned scheduling
difficulties as a particularly vexing aspect of training,
and turnover, at 14%, remains a typical problem. One of you
pooh-poohed this difficulty, saying, “Train your staff;
even if they leave, you’ll attract people who want to
learn and grow, and pass on the information to the public.”
While on the whole you reported
only spending 11% of your work time training staff, 35% of
our respondents reported that they conducted daily training
sessions, and even more (39%) conduct weekly sessions. About
one-fifth use some combination of daily and less frequent
training sessions. Staff tastings, quizzes, and even field
trips to wineries are all tools being used out there.
When it comes to keeping
track of your cellar, approximately one-fifth of you haven’t
settled on a single program and use a combination of POS systems
together with spreadsheets like Excel or Lotus. Among those
that specified, Micros dominates the POS field at 20.5%, while
Excel remains the standard spreadsheet program at 34%. 8%
of you continue to do things the old-fashioned way, but 3.5%
have found computer inventory tracking useful enough to invest
in some sort of customized system.
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Wines
that Move:
Both the average price of
bottles sold and the typical markup your responses showed
classic bell curves; markups centered around the 250% point
and bottle price in the $50-$70 range. While many of you reported
that guests were becoming more knowledgeable and/or adventurous,
domestic – mostly Californian – Cabernet Sauvignon
and Chardonnay top the list for popularity for bottle sales
at 26% and 20%, respectively. The only other category to crack
the double-digit barrier was domestic Merlot at 12%. All told,
more than three-quarters of the most popular bottles were
home-grown. Despite talk in the press about the rising popularity
of wines from Down Under, not a single respondent indicated
that an Aussie wine was their most popular bottle; however,
food-friendly New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc made a blip on the
screen at 2.5%.
Domestic Chardonnay really
rules the roost when it comes to By-the-Glass sales, clocking
in at 44%. Again, domestic Merlot is the only other wine in
the double digits (13.5%). Australian reds do make a showing
in the By-the-Glass category at 3.5%, and Champagne apparently
exploits its suitability as an aperitif to account for its
mark at 6.5%. There’s a red-white dichotomy between
the bottle and by-the-glass categories. While two-thirds of
the most popular bottles were red, the same proportion of
whites dominated the by-the-glass poll. In both categories,
top picks that were country-specific – Italy, Spain
– generally only came up in restaurant’s featuring
cuisine with the same origins, which in some ways makes guests’
choices seem even less adventurous.
We asked about consumer
trends, and it seems you all see things differently; there
were very few trends on which a significant portion of you
agreed. The most telling was that 37% of our respondents felt
that consumers were spending less on wine and/or becoming
more concerned with value when choosing their wine; nonetheless,
5% of you indicated the opposite. Several respondents in New
York and elsewhere mentioned September 11th as the turning
point away from premium wines.
You also felt that value
and price were your guests’ most important factors in
choosing a wine in general, followed by varietal – another
reason domestic wines still have an advantage over many Old
World producers. Food pairing considerations and familiarity
with the producer also figured prominently at 18% each. The
latter, taken together with prestige at 10%, shows how important
branding is for today’s producers; well-known names
continue to have impressive inertia in the market. A perhaps
depressing statistic for those of you who work the floor a
lot: only 6% felt that a description of the wine was an important
factor in a guest’s decision. But those that disagree
with the statistic are passionate about it; one respondent
writes “Story. You can sell anything if you have a great
story!” And another felt that his guests want to know
“ Does the wine give you that tingly feeling all over?;”
it’s hard put that – “the X factor,”
as he calls it – into a chart.
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