Improving Wine Sales with High Quality Wine Menus and Beverage Menus

As you may know, recently, the US became the number one wine consuming country overtaking France.

However, US consumer's ‘Wine IQ’ hasn't kept pace with the increasing demand.

With over 105,000 wine labels now available to US wine consumers, (and that number is growing), it’s no wonder that many diners develop ‘Wine Selection Anxiety’ when it comes time to order a bottle of wine to accompany dinner. With so many nondescript wines available to them, many diners will choose a wine based either on price, or their server’s suggestion.

“But wait,” you may be saying, “Virtually all restaurants that sell wine, already provide a wine menu. Aren’t you setting us up to tell us we will sell more wine by adopting wine menus?”

Yes, I am going to suggest that wine menus do drive wine sales. And I also agree with you that any restaurant that sells wine to its patrons already has a wine menu. But I am also going to make some suggestions about wine menus that will give you an excellent chance of driving even more wine sales. In addition, if you implement some of these suggestions your customers will keep coming back because your wine menu creates truly delighted customers.

Menus - Another Type of POS

I’d like for you to think of a wine menu just as another type of point of-sale promotion (POS). After all, the wine menu offered to restaurant patrons is a form of advertising or merchandising that is meant to influence diners to make a wine buying decision while at the point of sale.

In other words, wine menus, like traditional POS types — signs, displays, etc. — are merchandising tools; and like all forms of POS, menus need to be carefully designed and tastefully executed.

According to Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research, generally restaurants with higher wine sales utilize wine menus that:

1. Are part of the food menu
2. Do not include a dollar sign in the price listed
3. Include multiple mentions of wine from a specific winery or wineries
4. Have lists with a minimum of 150 labels and
5. Include a “Special” or “Reserve” categories of wines

Of course, it goes without saying that providing some information about the wine mentioned on the list will serve to reduce wine selection anxiety.

A related fact is that restaurants with lower wine sales utilized menus that only categorized wine by style, with a limited number of choices, and which were dominated by low price-point wines.

If you are a wine distributor, or the customer of a wine distributor, it would be to your advantage to heed Cornell’s findings and adopt as many of the above recommendations as possible. It could be quite an advantage for you if you were able to keep track of and measure the success of the menus you created that follow these successful wine menu characteristics.

The good news is, there is a powerful merchandising tool that will help you track, measure and manage your customers’ wine menus so that both your customers — and you — sell more wine.

That tool is MenuTrak! For more information please click this button: