5a. You’re not a wine bar. You’re a restaurant with wines by the glass and you tagged “Wine Bar” on the end of your name. This is forgivable if only because I understand how hard it is to run a successful restaurant. If you stick some marketing mumbo-jumbo in your name to get butts in the seats, so be it. but this usually means…
5b. Your selection of wines by the glass is weak. Got to see more than three whites and four reds on your by-the-glass menu.
4. You don’t serve olives. I love olives.
3. No proper wine glasses, just tiny 7-ounce glass sippy-cups. I’m a total grouch about this. Wine needs to come in a big glass otherwise I’ll get it on my shirt when I do the snob-swirl. When I smell the wine, I like to get my nose deep in there like I’m a hound tracking waterfowl that someone just shot out of the air. When I try to sniff out of the mini-glasses, I either get no aroma at all or a nose full of wine. Look, we all saw Sideways. We all know how to sniff the wine. Spring for the big glasses.
2. Warm red wines. An unforgivable sin to pour a red wine that has been sitting on top of a refrigeration unit. If I need to let my wine COOL before I drink it, then I am not sitting in a wine bar, I’m sitting at the bar of an establishment that doesn’t know how to handle wine. I won’t be sitting there long.
1. Sky-high prices on wines by the glass. I understand wine is popular so you can charge a good amount for it. I understand the standard 2x-3x restaurant markup from retail. I get that some risk is assumed in pouring by the glass, in that you may end up with 3/4 of a bottle that goes off overnight. But, some of these places are charging 1/3 of their bottle price as their per glass price. Cheap grocery store wines are being poured for $9 a glass. I need to go into double digits to find something I like. THIS HAS GOT TO STOP. There are plenty of inexpensive finds out there that you can pour in the $5-$6 range. Go find some. Get your distributor on the phone. Ask your employees. Do something!
Image is a CC licensed photo of Cava Wine Bar in Capitola, CA from Flickr user Donnaphoto . As you can see they use proper glasses and serve olives.
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