For restaurants, bars and hotels that serve wine
Wine Profit Checkup
Send me your wine list. I'll send back the four numbers it should be run on, and the reason it isn't earning what you think it is.
Three a month, because I do each one myself. No obligation at the end of it, and I have no wine to sell you.
That is the whole of the Wine Profit Checkup.
Right now the wine on your list is priced somewhere between a guess and an inherited habit, which is nobody's fault and is quietly expensive.
I read the list line by line against your own supplier prices, your own tax rate and your own food menu, and come back with the four figures a wine list actually runs on:
- what a bottle earns you once tax is out
- what a glass earns you
- how much of your money is sitting in the cellar
- whether a guest can find a wine or only a price
Each one arrives with the working behind it and its reading in plain language.
Behind them sits what the current list is costing you over a year.
It costs nothing. I do three a month. It is yours whether we ever work together or not.
Every other line in your house has a number behind it. Wine is the one you have to guess at.
You know your food cost down to the plate, because somebody sat with the recipes and set prices that survive a bad week.
Ask what a given dish contributes and you could tell me, or find out in ten minutes with the sheet you already have.
Then somebody asks the same question about the wine, and there is a half-second where you go looking for a number that was never there.
What comes out is a multiplier: times three, or times three and a half, or whatever the last owner was using, applied across a page that grew one bottle at a time because a rep had a good year somewhere.
You have said it often enough that it passes for an answer, and the person asking usually moves on.
That half-second has nothing to do with how carefully you run the place.
It is there because wine is the one line in the house nobody ever built the sheet for, which is also why deciding that wine should do more for you, the decision you were making when you clicked through here, runs into a wall almost immediately.
More than what, measured how?
You cannot run a line of your business on numbers nobody has ever shown you, and that is why I built the Checkup around producing them instead of around handing out advice.
Where the four numbers come from
Real Margin
Figures 1 & 2Every line gets a true cost, with your VAT or sales tax taken out of the sell price rather than quietly left inside it, which is the single most common place I find money sitting.
Out of that come the first two figures, contribution margin per bottle and contribution margin per glass.
By the glass is usually where the gap is widest, which makes it the one worth learning to read first.
A pour that is actively managed sits somewhere around 75 to 80 percent margin, while one left on autopilot drifts well below that without anybody in the building noticing.
Inventory size
Figure 3How much money is sitting in the cellar, counted as the bottles you actually hold.
The list is supposed to move that stock into the glass.
What stays on the rack is cash you cannot spend, and the size of it is the third figure.
Wine list experience
Figure 4The last pass grades the list the way a guest meets it.
Is it organized enough to find a bottle that belongs with the dish, or is the only thing the eye can use the price?
That reading is the fourth figure, scored the same way as the other three.
Put the four together and you have the state of your list in numbers, specific to your venue and built from your own prices rather than an industry average.
The last line of the arithmetic adds them up into what the current list costs you over a year.
It is the same calculation I would run for a paid rebuild, which is why I can give it away as a diagnostic.
I trained started working in restaurants first as a cookand then ran F&B, which is where the cost half of this comes from. The WSET and the sommelier certification came afterwards, and they are why I can also tell you whether what is in the glass is any good. I have been in gastronomy since 2012. I do not sell wine and I do not represent a supplier, so there is no cellar behind me that needs emptying.
Your supplier, a sommelier, a template, a consultant: none of them will hand you these four figures.
Your supplier. He knows his own range better than anyone you could hire, and if you ask for help he will genuinely give it.
You have also sat through the afternoon: the case comes in with the glasses, and an hour later two bottles you had not planned on are on the order.
What he cannot do is tell you what your list is losing, because an honest answer would mean opening up his own margin on the bottles he sold you.
A sommelier. In fine dining a good one lifts the whole room and I will not pretend otherwise.
But the training is built around the palate and the cellar rather than contribution margin, and very few of the somms I know were ever taught to take the tax out of a sell price.
There is also the salary, which in a house of forty to eighty seats has to survive every budget review it meets, and you already know how that conversation goes.
A template or a piece of software. Either will give you a tidier page by tomorrow, and if your list is genuinely a mess that is worth having.
If you have bought software for this before you already know how it ends, which is a dashboard somebody logs into for the first fortnight and a tab nobody has opened since spring.
What neither knows is what you pay your suppliers, what your tax rate does to that number, or which of your dishes each wine has to survive sitting beside.
The layout was never the expensive part.
A hospitality consultant. He will read your P&L properly and tell you the beverage line is running off plan, which you had worked out already and which now has an invoice attached to it.
Very few can then tell you which wine belongs by the glass, at what price, next to which dish.
What is missing in every case is the same person: somebody who reads a P&L and a wine list with equal fluency and has nothing of their own to sell you at the end.
Which is why every route you have tried gave you half an answer, one half from the people who know wine and the other from the people who know numbers, and never both from the same person.
That gap is why Wine CFO exists, and those four figures are what it produces.
What one venue did once it could see the numbers
A 40-seat bistro I worked with roughly tripled the wine it sold.
I rebuilt the selection around what was actually coming out of the kitchen, then rewrote the page so the wines stopped being French names nobody at the table could pronounce and became plain descriptions that matched the dishes, which meant a guest could pick a bottle without having to perform confidence about it.
Nothing about the room or the kitchen changed, and nobody on the floor was asked to sell harder.
The list stopped getting in the guest's way, and the money that had been parked in the wrong bottles started arriving instead.
Getting yours
LIMITED: 3 per monthHere is the part worth being blunt about.
Whatever your list is losing, it loses again next month and again the month after, and the arithmetic does not pause while the season is busy.
The slow bottles keep sitting there with your cash inside them while your floor team reaches for the two pours they feel confident about, and the second-cheapest red goes on winning every table it is offered to.
Then the beverage line comes up again, somebody asks the same question, and you hear yourself giving the same answer you gave last time.
That is the part that costs more than the money.
You have already seen why the obvious ways around this do not produce the figures.
The version where you have them is fairly unremarkable, which is rather the point.
Nothing about your room or your kitchen changes.
What changes is that the next time somebody asks, the half-second is gone: you answer with a figure, and the next question is what to do about it rather than how you know.
- What you send
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Your wine list, your food menu, and your supplier prices if you can reach them without turning it into a project.
A photo taken on your phone between services is enough to start, and it does not need to be straight or well lit.
If the prices are buried somewhere, I will work with what you have and tell you plainly which of the figures is an estimate and by how much.
- What comes back
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A written Checkup with the four figures on its first page and the working shown, and a last page that adds them into what your current list is costing you over a year.
You take it from the presentation.
I do not email the results before we have gone through them together, and once you have them you can forward them to whoever signs things off.
- 1 True margin, line by line
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Your tax comes out of the sell price before anything else happens, and then you get real cost and contribution margin per bottle.
This is where the arithmetic most often breaks.
The section names your worst lines and what each one is costing you, and in most houses at least one of them is a bottle somebody in the building is personally fond of.
- 2 By the glass, costed on its own
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The pours get pulled out and read as a separate business, because the gap is normally widest there and the money is the fastest to collect.
You get what each glass earns now and what it should be earning instead, which is usually a change you can make on the same page you are already printing this month.
- 3 Inventory size
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How much of your money is sitting in the cellar, counted bottle by bottle rather than guessed from the rack.
This section totals that cash and splits what is turning from what is only occupying space.
The second pile is usually larger than anyone in the building has said out loud.
- 4 Wine list experience
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Whether the page is organized, and whether a guest can find a bottle that belongs with the dish, or whether the only thing in front of them is the price.
You are graded on this the same way you are graded on the numbers.
A list that offers nothing but a price comparison sends the table to the cheaper bottle every time.
- Then the part you can do without me
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A short list of changes that need nobody's help, mostly lines to reprice and a couple of wines that belong by the glass rather than buried on the bottle list.
Do them next week and keep whatever they earn you, whether you ever reply to me or not.
I would rather you made money off this and remembered where it came from.
- Why it costs nothing
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It is how I find the venues worth working with, and showing somebody their own numbers is a far better argument than describing a method to them.
If your list turns out to be in decent shape, that is what I will tell you.
Nothing is attached to it and nobody is standing behind me with stock to move.
- Why there are only three
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Each one means going through a supplier price list line by line, and there are only so many I can do properly in a month alongside client work.
When the three are gone the form says so, and the next slot is in the following month.
After you send it
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Submitted
A short form: how to reach you, a few questions about the venue, and the list and the menu if you have them to hand. A photo taken between services is enough. About five minutes.
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First look
1 business dayI check that what you sent is sound enough to work from. If a price, a page, or a detail is missing, I get in touch and ask for it before the checkup starts.
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The checkup
2–3 business daysI read the list myself, compare your prices, your tax and your menu, and produce the four numbers. Not a program.
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The presentation
30 or 60 minutesWe pick a time and I walk you through what the checkup found. You leave with everything I produced. It is yours to keep. I do not email the results before that conversation.
Whatever you decide afterwards, the figures will exist.
That is the whole difference between sending the list this afternoon and leaving it another season, because in one version you know the number and in the other you are still answering the question the way you answered it last time.
Before you send it
- Free? What is the catch?
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The catch is that I am hoping the figures turn out big enough that you want help acting on them, and that you think of me when you do.
That is the entire model.
The Checkup is yours either way, all four with their readings and the actions along with them, and I earn nothing from what you buy or who you buy it from.
- We do not have five minutes, let alone the numbers.
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Send a photo of the wine list and a photo of the food menu and start there.
Supplier prices sharpen the margin work considerably, so a look through the invoices is worth it, but I would rather have your list with half the data than not have it.
- Are you going to tell me my list is bad?
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Most of the lists I read were put together by capable people under time pressure, working from advice given by somebody who had a cellar to move.
If you have ever half-braced for a professional to tell you that you have been doing it wrong, you can put that down: the structural problem is what I am looking for, and it is the same one nearly every list has.
What comes back is four figures and a plan rather than a verdict on your palate.
- We are a long way from Switzerland.
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The cost maths travels.
Rates and rules differ by country, the logic of true cost and contribution margin does not, and the Checkup is done remotely from what you send me.
Tell me where you are in the form and the calculation gets run against your local tax and your own suppliers.
Marco, Wine CFO
P.S. The numbers are yours regardless.
After the presentation, if you decide the gaps are small enough to live with, the Checkup did its job and cost you a five-minute form.
Nothing renews, and there is no follow-up email chasing you.
The venues I work with are the ones who hear the figures and decide they would rather have the money.
P.P.S. Everything above assumes you pour wine for a guest sitting at a table, and that somebody at that table is deciding between two bottles with your page in their hand.
A wine shop or an importer is a different business with different maths, and the figures I handed them would be the wrong ones, so I do not take those.
P.P.P.S. What surprises people is rarely the size of the total at the bottom.
It is which of the four the money was hiding in, because it is almost never the expensive bottles anybody worries about.
It is usually the one you pour most and have never once thought about.