Expand your customers' wine horizons

Widening your drinks offer is a great way to make your pub stand out. Here are some suggestions, courtesy of Andrew Jefford

I am and I say this in all modesty a popular neighbour. The fences are well-maintained, my musical preferences rattle no one's windows, I don't collect half-dismembered Rover 2000s, and sugar and tea-bags are available for the needy at all hours.

None of that, mind you, has anything to do with my popularity. Instead, it's the fact that my job requires me to taste a lot of wine, and that wine (minus a small sample) is happier going to a good home rather than being poured down the drain.

I am, therefore, the neighbourhood wine fairy, responsible for the assortment of bottles my somnolent neighbours find on their doorsteps along with the milk in the mornings.

Tasting changes opinions

The rewards of this for me are that I get to gauge their reactions to various bottles that I have already tasted. And the results are often startling: changed opinions, opened minds, increased enthusiasm and promises to switch purchasing habits the moment the shops re-open.

I don't know how often the neighbours really do revise the contents of their wine racks (and the price of the better bottles often comes as a shock), but when I move house in a month or so the street I'm leaving should be subtly different to the one I arrived in.

There is, I've concluded, no substitute for the chance to try something new and expand your drinking horizons. Everyone enjoys it. I'm always amazed, consequently, by how little use is made of tasting serves and samples in pubs and restaurants as a way of getting customers to try something new. The key, after all, to maximising profits and minimising the problems associated with those profits is to have a happy, interested, enthusiastic and well-informed clientele rather than one that is merely fuelling an addiction or drinking its way to oblivion.

If, as the BBPA claims, 76% of all spirits and 84% of all wines are served at home, and the total percentage of alcohol consumed at home is increasing by as much as 9% a year, then a radical rethink of the choice available in most pubs would seem to be called for.

Price may be one reason why more and more people drink at home, but it's by no means the only one. Choice, I suspect, is every bit as important. For most drinkers, the off-trade provides a far greater choice of interesting beers, wines and spirits than the on-trade.

Any restaurateur who is serious about creating a good wine list quickly learns that the secret is to find a range of interesting wines that you won't find on supermarket shelves. Licensees should take note.

Obviously the range of drinks has to be appropriate to the location and the clientele, and no one is expecting a wine list the size of War and Peace in a community local. But there are few pubs anywhere that couldn't usefully expand their selection with, for example, a range of unusual bottled beers, a choice of wines that gets off the familiar branded track, or a small collection of malt whiskies.

It doesn't matter too much, in truth, what your enthusiasm is; it's communicating it that's important, and getting your customers to try something different that sparks the imagination and opens up the sensual horizon.

Chilean wines, Trappist ales, Spanish brandies, Calvados, Polish vodkas: whatever you enjoy most is what you'll sell best. Merely pushing what you have been told to, or what offers the best margins, will always be doomed to failure in the long run.

Samples don't have to be free

Tasting samples, remember, don't have to be given away. At this time of year, there are few greater pleasures in the wine regions of Germany and Austria than setting off on wine-tasting tours of growers' cellars.

In many cases, what you'll buy will be a little carousel of five or six wines in small samples, giving you a chance to taste and compare different wines.

You don't have to scrimp on the serve-size in order to expand your customers' horizons. I used to know a sommelier who ran a list of 400 wines in his hotel-restaurant, any one of which was available by the glass on request.

How did he do it?

What, I used to wonder, if someone wanted a glass of something obscure and the next customer for it wandered in five weeks later? I was looking at it in the wrong way, he told me.

If you open a bottle for someone, just make sure you sell the rest of that bottle to four or five other customers within a day or two.

And no matter how expensive or obscure the wine, he could always do it because customers respond so well to the host's passion, excitement and enthusiasm.