Brewery Wine List: Come At Me Dog

Looking to create the most baller wine list of any brewery in the country. Given the limited access to top notch wines, it’s a challenge!

No sqn??

It would be tragic to drink some of those so young.

Where is this?

My brewery in Laurel, MD. The concept is to provide these wines for on premise consumption at or below auction pricing. We have a scratch kitchen to support the wine and beer with great food. The dream is to bring competitive Burgundy style restaurant wine prices back to the US.

SQN will hopefully be coming soon.

As someone who spends almost as much time on beer as I do wine, I love the idea. Would frequent your brewery if was in my part of town.
Good luck!

Funny, one of my best friends is opening a brewery in Orlando in 3 weeks. We’ve been helping him put together a wine list that actually sells. Things like Kim Crawford, Prisoner, etc. Naturally, I wont be drinking wine there!

Good luck with this Justin! I have been meaning to get up there but now there is a new found urgency!!

This is awesome. But i keep hearing how it’s impossivle to survive as a restaurant if u don’t markup a shit ton in beverages.

How is selling wine at retail possible? High level don’t have to give away trade secret.

Really interesting. Like Dennnis, I spend at least as much time drinking beer as I do wine, maybe more. So, I was trying to think about what would make me drink wine at a Brewery. If the beer is worth the visit, then the primary driver (for me) would be a hard to find wine at a great price. But, I don’t know if you are trying to attract pure wine drinkers to visit your brewery, or entice beer drinkers to drink some wine every once and a while? Then, there are the non-beer drinkers who accompany friends to the brewery that want a glass of wine - not sure how interested many of those people would be in grabbing a glass of Petrus, or MacDonald, etc.

Website?

How is selling wine at retail possible? High level don’t have to give away trade secret.

Turnover.

There are plenty of restaurants that do it.

Justin - are you going to Coravin those or sell whole bottles? Maybe also seek out a few better producers selling half bottles?

Hmm. Say $50 wholesale. $100 retail.

Restaurant A sells it for $300 and tells me they need this to survive. $250 profit once

Restaurant B sells it for $120 and you are telling me it’s turnover?
At $70 profit, B need to turn 3.5 bottles to every one bottle A sells. Is that right?

That seems crazy high.

I’ve visited Justin’s brewery. He does have a bunch of cherries on site. Looks like a fun place for a splurge at prices that won’t make you feel too guilty.

Do you have a list online Justin?

Jay and other Baltimore/DC locals - we should arrange a visit.

I’d be very curious to see the whole list.

First of all, $50 wholesale would be $75 retail, standard, but then usually with a case discount attached to it. Unless it is a market price wine.

Restaurants are usually 2-3x wholesale (sometimes more). I own a restaurant and I use a decelerating exponential pricing function so that the more expensive the cost of a bottle, the lower the markup with a lower asymptote of 2x wholesale. We’re a COD state, so turning inventory is paramount. I’d love to be able to mark everything up 4x, but I’m a wine-lover before I “invested” in a restaurant so I try to create a place that I would personally like. I think that Justin is doing the same.

All that matters is cash flow…2 ways to get there, price em high and sell a few here and there or price them aggressively and move thru at a higher rate…volume or margin make the call. Any list that doesn’t move is just deadly for restaurants, a bunch of cherries that don’t sell is as bad a proposition as a bunch of plonk that doesn’t sell, you’re making zero dollars daily on wine sales.

(Purely for casual dining) Personally I always consulted people to multiply cost x 3 and divide by 4 for BTG wines and offer those by the bottle for the price of 3 glasses then decide on a $ amount that would make them happy per bottle and mark every wine up that amount.