Pour more.
We work with restaurant operators to unlock their wine list, lifting sales while improving unit margins.
We work with restaurant operators to unlock their wine list, lifting sales while improving unit margins.
What we often see
Wine programs can be a restaurant's best friend. They elevate your customer's experience while rewarding you with a bigger ticket and margin. But even in well managed programs we often see more potential:
How do we move those great bottles you bought, aging in your cellar, while the same few names do all the pouring?
How do we optimize your by-the-glass list to move through more volume and reduce waste?
How do we get your front-of-house to confidently connect your customer with an extraordinary pairing that they can't get anywhere else?
What we do
Decanting opens a good wine up — gives it air, lets it show what it already has. We do the same for a program: pair a sommelier's read of the list with an operator's read of the numbers, then make the small set of moves that get more of it ordered.
We analyze your sales numbers, highlighting hidden trends and gaps in how your customers order. We talk with your team to understand how they operate your wine program in the room. And we instill your vision — we want to supercharge it, not change it.
Three impact areas
What the typical independent wine program isn't yet earning — more guests ordering wine, and the bottles you already pour selling faster.
How we read a room
We look at each wine through five lenses to understand its role and how it can best lift your business.
Does the list fit what the room actually orders?
Does every wine on the list earn its place?
Is each wine priced for the job it does?
Can a guest find the thing to order?
Can the floor sell it — every shift?
Under all five: honest accounting. Conservative math — the floor, never the ceiling — and every change judged twice: more profitable, and more itself.
How to start
Thirty minutes, by phone or video — the room, the program, what you'd want different. No deck, nothing to prepare.
A written one-page diagnostic of your program, built from the call and whatever you can share. Useful whether or not we ever work together.
If there's real work worth doing, we make the moves with you — and the wine, and the margin, start to move. If there isn't, we say so.
See the full engagement, step by step → Download the one-page process (PDF) →
Ways we can work together
A 30-minute conversation, a written diagnostic, then a proposal. From there, a shape that fits the room:
A one-time read of your existing program — list, BTG, a few weeks of POS — handed back as a written diagnosis and a short set of specific moves.
Includes
Four touchpoints across the year, each tied to the season — the list moves with the menu and the room.
Includes
A monthly partnership for rooms where wine is a real driver. Everything in Seasonal, plus hands-on implementation — someone executing the moves.
Includes
Most rooms start with a Snapshot — and if you keep going, it folds straight into a Seasonal or Annual partnership on the same analysis. Running a group? The same work scales to multi-location concepts and multi-brand portfolios.
Who we work with
Not a size or a concept — an owner-operator still close to the room who wants the wine program to earn its keep. Usually that looks like:
Neighborhood rooms where the list grew by addition and was never rebuilt.
Upper-casual rooms where the by-the-glass is underpriced or the bottle ladder is flat.
Operators who inherited a program and want to know what they actually own.
Growing concepts — a second location, a sister brand — wanting one approach across rooms.
The question operators ask first
“How is this different from my wine rep?”
A distributor rep is paid to sell their book — that's the structure, not a knock. The wines they recommend are wines they can place.
Decanteur sells nothing: no inventory, no commissions. You pay us, and our read spans importers across your market — built on your point-of-sale and inventory data. The read is about your program, not someone's portfolio.
Straight about it
That a wine list fills your dining room — your food, your room, and your reviews do that, and we won't take credit for it. That you'll see the whole change overnight — the pricing fixes show in weeks, the fuller story builds across a season. Or that we'll stand behind a number we can't actually stand behind. If the math doesn't clear the cost of the work, we'll say so — and the read of your program is yours to keep either way.
30 minutes of your time, no obligations. That's it. If we find an opportunity together we can go from there.