Curating a successful wine program requires time, strategic planning, continuous education, and a desire to meet member preferences. There are many different approaches to creating balance with your offerings, but first, you need to determine the purpose of your list.
Is it there to satisfy the oenologist, offer value to the novice, or perhaps your club is near wine country, and you would like to be regionally centric? Most likely, it is a combination of many factors that create a specific service for a broad range of members and guests. Identifying the style of food served in your dining rooms is the first step to understanding the style of wine you’ll be offering. Your club’s cuisine needs to be a major consideration in how you will market your offerings. Do you have a family-centric grill room that requires mid-range Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, or a posh steakhouse that requires high tannin Cabernets and Sangiovese from Napa, Tuscany, or Bordeaux?
Creating price categories is a strategic way to start. For instance, perhaps you’d like to have 50% of your list under $100 a bottle, 20% between $100 and $135, 20% between $135 and $200, and 10% at $200 and above. Defining the number of producers, types of grape varieties, and geographic locations can assist in guiding you to curating a successful list. Once you’ve committed to the quantity, price categories, and producers, you’ll have a much better idea of the cost to build the inventory. It all comes down to creating a strategic plan.
A strategic plan helps identify how many bottles of wine you would like to keep in inventory. Breaking that number down into regional selections, grape varieties, and vintages will give you a specific outline of how you want to develop your wine program. For example, wine lists that contain 50 selections can be very practical as long as those selections are carefully thought out. I often see wine lists that are too large and could be intimidating to the average consumer. Identifying your membership, their preferences, and their price point is a great way to begin to build depth in your club’s wine cellar. Over time, you’ll have the opportunity to grow the cellar while building trust within the membership. Starting with a balanced approach and strong foundation allows for consistency and will create room to expand a section of your club’s list into more obscure varieties and producers.
Building depth in your club’s cellar doesn’t always have to come with a high price tag. Focusing on smaller wineries, single vineyards, premier cru, and biodynamic options is a great approach. Remember to leave room for producers that carry brand-name recognition, like Opus One, Château Lafite Rothschild, Schloss Johannisberg, and Château de Beaucastel. These will give your list depth and recognition without backloading the inventory with 1st growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundies.
The market has tremendous value; you can allow your wine merchants to do the legwork for you. It is wise to sample current and past vintages with your wine committee or food and beverage team each time you invest in your club.
Building depth without breaking the bank is an art of the cellar master. We had a fail-proof system for choosing a great value at the Bohemian Club (San Francisco, Calif.). Each month, our beverage manager would arrange to have our vendors sample 30 to 40 bottles of a particular style, each bottle brown-bagged and numbered. Perhaps a particular tasting for the month would consist of Chardonnay, which could encompass California, France, Australia, and so on. We would begin at one end of the room and walk our way around, tasting and rating each wine. It was a simple process: we would rate the wines as yes, no, or maybe. Our tasting panel would consist of members and staff. After tasting, we would calculate a weighted average and reevaluate the top seven to ten wines to ensure consistency. Since the tasting was blind, we were usually surprised to discover ten out of ten times the winners were wines you would not have expected. But these sorts of tastings identify wines of great quality, typically for a reasonable value. Often, requesting samples in a specified cost range, $20 to $25 bottle cost, would produce excellent results for value-driven wines destined for the list.
Education is empowerment. The wine industry perpetuates itself yearly with vintage variations, new producers, new trends, and emerging styles. Staying educated will help you identify better quality wines that will improve the depth of your cellar. Knowing which vintages in specific regions may or may not have been affected by poor weather, frost, rain, drought, or fires will provide you with the knowledge to make proper investments. En Primeur, or wine futures, allows the consumer to purchase wine based on its potential. Investing in wine futures can be tricky and risky but can also be very rewarding. Many wine regions participate in selling futures, such as Burgundy, Rhone, Piedmont, and, of course, the creator of En Primeur – Bordeaux. Each spring, producers offer up barrel samples of their wines to distributors and critics, allowing them to rate the wine’s potential and create a value-driven market price. At this time, the wines can be purchased by consumers and distributed up to 18 months after bottling. An interesting concept that can save you 10% to 20% on globally recognized producers.
Playing the allocation game… The best and most sought-after wines are most often allocated through producers. Created to control mass purchasing by the more than fortunate, allocations help wine buyers with less financial depth procure smaller quantities of trendy, uber-popular wines, like DRC (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti) or Château Angelus, classified as a Premier Grand Cru Classé A. Most providers of fine wine will help strategize a plan and assist in creating an allocation of desired wines. Remember that allocations are taken very seriously and are a “take it or lose it” system, regardless of great or poor vintages. However, allocations are a great way to build depth and agility in your club’s cellar consistently.
Stay happily committed to your plan and be enthusiastic about your selections. Members will realize the amount of effort and passion you are placing in the wine program.
