How A Sommelier Designs The Wine List For A Restaurant

What has two thumbs and makes a wine list?

Hi, I'm sommelier Andre Hueston Mack, and today,

I'm gonna show you how I make a wine list for a restaurant.

The food menu, the wine list, the aesthetics,

they all go hand-in-hand to setting the tone

for a great evening of dining out.

[upbeat music]

I've created thousands of wine lists throughout my career,

so I'm gonna be looking at a menu that was created

by the great team here at Bon Appetit,

and then I'm gonna try to create a wine menu around that.

A wine list isn't just about putting a list

or a selection of great wines

that pair with the food together.

It has to be profitable.

It has to be thought out.

There's budgets.

There's all kinds of other things

that aren't as sexy as choosing the wine.

I do like to do this with a glass of wine.

I feel like it takes me to that place.

Cheers.

[upbeat music]

When I first look at the menu,

this is a traditional French bistro,

I just wanna look at the price of the menu

and look at, like, the entrees.

There's not a hard-set rule on pricing for average bottle.

To me, I generally look

at the top two most expensive entrees and double it.

If there's two people dining,

somebody ordered the lamb chops

and somebody ordered the bouillabaisse, you know,

we're basically talking about $45 per person.

Double that, and they're probably maybe ordering

an $80 bottle of wine.

So, like, based off of these price points on the entrees,

I'm thinking the sweet spot

for wine would probably be somewhere

around 80 to $150 a bottle.

Wines by the bottle are traditionally done

with a three-time markup.

So whatever you pay, multiply it by three,

and that goes onto the wine list.

So you're normally around like 27 times three.

Puts you at $80 on the wine list and so forth.

So if we were gonna say 80 to 150 is your sweet spot,

then you get to play with, you know,

something around 26 to $50.

Like I said, it's not an exact science,

but it's always a formula that I've used.

It's so funny, right?

'Cause three times is not even egregious.

There's a lotta hidden costs

that I think a lotta people don't know right up front,

from electric bill, right? [chuckles]

If you saw, like, what food costs are.

Next thing is labor,

just the amount of people that it takes to run a restaurant,

and at the end of the day, you know,

a very small margin is what we take home.

You know, maybe you start to look around

and you be like, I think it's these chairs.

These chairs are really heavy and expensive.

Maybe that's why the wine markup.

[mellow music]

Whatever someone's gonna pay for one the hors doeuvres

or one of the, you know, appetizers, so to speak,

I think the wine by the glass

should be priced the same there.

So if I'm ordering the duck liver mouse for 17,

there is an option for something to be around 15 to $18.

And generally speaking, the rule of thumb is

whatever you pay for the bottle wholesale

is what you should charge for the glass.

So if I bought XYZ Sauvignon Blanc

for $15 a bottle wholesale,

then I should sell it for $15 a glass.

Once you open the bottle of wine, you're at risk.

If they sit, you don't get a lotta turnover,

then you get bad glasses of wine, there's more waste,

so you need to cover your costs right away.

So once you open that first bottle of wine,

it should be covered, it should be paid for.

People are gonna be throwing tomatoes and [beep]

at the screen. [laughs]

[relaxing music]

Opening a restaurant is very expensive,

very, very, very, very expensive,

and when you start to throw in a pretty large wine list,

it gets to be way more expensive than that.

But if I look at this,

I would say this is medium to large place, you know,

so they probably have a decent wine list,

I would say at least 100 selections,

50 whites, 50 reds, something like that.

You know, maybe at a $15,000 budget,

100 selections isn't something that we could do.

30,000 seems about right, that we could make that work.

Once you're open, you know,

could you scale back a little bit, could you add more?

This is, you know, a big money-maker.

It's how you get the high ticket average,

and that's what you want, higher check average.

People tip on top of that, driving and,

you know, producing revenue,

better wages and tips for your staff.

So you wanna have some of those high ticket items.

You know, and what I always say to people is like,

You can't sell a $750 bottle of wine

if you don't have a $750 bottle of wine on your list.

You know, another important thing is, like,

where are we gonna store all this?

It's expensive inventory

that needs to be under lock and key.

It has to be somewhat temperature controlled.

You know, these are all perishable products, right?

It gets too hot, the wine will cook,

all the inventory's done.

And that also determines how large the list was gonna be.

[relaxing music]

We've gone through kinda some of the things

that will determine pricing, selection, how many selections.

Next, I would wanna taste the food.

Granted, these are all things that I've seen

on any French bistro menu, the greatest hits,

duck liver mousse, steak tartare, escargot.

Steak frites is like a huge one.

It's classical bistro fair.

I think we would be doing it a disservice

if we just didn't use French wine.

And what I would probably do here differently would be

to look for some of the new kids on the block

that are doing stuff a little bit differently.

The first thing I would do, I think a fun exercise

for me, is I would pair a wine by the glass

for each item on the menu

so I know that I've selected one particular wine to go

with each particular dish,

and I think that kinda sews everything up.

Onion soup, you know, under whites, I'm thinking, you know,

more of what we call a field blend from Alsace.

That's called a Edelzwicker,

so that's kind of, you know,

just gonna be a full blend of Pinot,

could be Pinot Gri, Pinot Blanc, Gewurztraminer,

something aromatic but these kinda rich-style white wines.

So I'm thinking Alsatian whites here,

and that would be somewhere between 13 and $15.

Oysters, you know, always to me, I'm thinking of Muscadet,

something from the coast,

definitely has, like, this salty brininess,

classic pairing with oysters.

A bistro classic is steak frites.

Thinking of more red wine here, something of Bordeaux.

Looking at the price point of the lamb chops is at $55,

I feel like someone who's gonna pay $55

for an entree would actually spend the extra $20 more

to get an appropriate glass of wine for that.

For here, I would probably do something like Syrah,

so a little bit more peppery and more in depth.

So maybe a declassified Cotes du Rhone

from a well-known producer,

meaning that it's just not, you know,

a everyday Cotes du Rhone.

Cotes du Rhone represents value,

but here, I think we'd like to step it up

and do something a little bit on the higher end

within that particular region,

so definitely something that could be anywhere from,

let's call it $18 to $20.

Obviously, I have to have some champagne.

To me, that goes hand-in-hand with pretty much anything

on the menu.

It's celebratory.

We would have non-vintage.

So non-vintage means that there's no vintage on the bottle,

that it's from several different vintages.

Then we would have vintage champagne, right?

So that's where it has the vintage date on it.

And then we'd also have, you know, tete de cuvee,

which is the head cuvees,

which are like the top wines, I think,

brands that people know like Dom P, Dom Perignon,

Cristal, Solas.

If we were looking at here by the glass,

we'd probably do the non-vintage.

So that's gonna be the entry level, not as expensive.

That's probably gonna be somewhere around $28 to $33.

The tete de cuvees, you know,

some of the top tier champagnes and the name recognition,

you know, those are gonna go anywhere from, you know,

500, depending on which vintage is,

to easily $3,000 a bottle.

[Speaker] Who's coming to your restaurant

and dropping three Gs on a bottle?

This is New York. What are you talking about?

Well, you don't know if you don't have it.

They're just gonna spend it at someone else's restaurant.

But, you know, this is Bistro de Andre, right?

This is happening, right?

This is trendy. People are there.

We don't have bouncers at the door, but we probably should.

By having these wines on your wine list, make a statement

about who you want your clientele to be as well.

Wine drinkers seek you out.

And then I think where you get the play

on some really great expressions of sparkling from France,

not Champagne, is pet-nat from the Loire.

You know, that's will probably be your entry level.

We're somewhere around from 10 to 13 here.

You know, so rose is interesting, you know,

at two different price points.

You know, Loire probably somewhere from 10 to 12.

Here, from like 13 to 18.

I think for people who don't live in New York,

maybe you won't think so,

but this all seems pretty fair to me.

I mean, obviously, I have some more things to flesh out here

on the reds by the glass,

but this should give me a snapshot of the list.

Now when we go to the wine by the bottle list,

we'll start to go through and kinda have multiple wines

from those regions until we got to our selections

of saying our 50 whites and our 50 reds.

[mellow music]

When pairing sweet wines, i.e., dessert wines, with dessert,

you want the wine to be less sweet than the actual dessert,

but you still wanna pair kinda like with like

and the sweetness with sweetness.

It's a wonderful way to end a meal.

So dessert wines are more expensive

in general than most wines, right?

It's a little bit more labor intensive,

especially when you start to talk

about something like Sauternes, which I think is one

of the most famous sweet wines produced in France.

And this works on what we call noble rot,

and noble rot is by just leaving the grapes

on the vine long enough that they start to rot,

and that dehydrates the grapes

but also concentrates the fruit,

and so when you crush them,

you know, you get this kind of nectar.

But what happens is you have to go what they call a triage.

And so you have to send teams of workers in the vineyards

to harvest, and it's not all at once,

and they just harvest the parts that have the noble rot,

and that gets expensive.

Now you have more labor.

You get less production

because of the rot and the dehydration.

So we're generally doing somewhere

around a three-ounce pour here for dessert wine.

So you can't have a French bistro

and not have Sauternes on the menu.

And then we would go from there, I like a Banyuls.

So Banyuls is from the South of France.

It has more Portly kinda qualities to it.

I'd like that for, like, something

for like the chocolate souffle.

Also you can lean on spirits a little bit here,

you know, having something like Chartreuse.

Having, like, some liqueurs here are great as well.

Sometimes this section gets overlooked,

so think three is is kind of perfect.

And that's, I think, it's like how you know that, like,

you're at a place or a restaurant that's thought it all out.

[upbeat music]

So today's exercise was just more of, like,

kinda sharing my ideas with you of, like,

how I start to create or even think about a wine list.

We talk about the more that the curtain is pulled, you know,

on the wine world, I think people start to understand

that it's just wine.

All the mystery has kinda gone away,

and the more information that you have and armed with,

the better decisions you'll make.

I remember my homeboy,

that was his safe word with his wife was souffle. [laughs]

Everybody's like...

I dunno, just a little tidbit to liven up,

to see if anybody's listening.

I know we're at the end of the day here.

Trying to keep it light.