The Raging Wine Playbook
How to Build a Wine Program Worth Bragging About
You already know your food. You know your neighborhood. This guide is about making your wine list punch as hard as the rest of your operation. Consider it a conversation over a glass of something good.
We review restaurant wine lists. Not menus. Not service. Not ambiance. Just the wine program: what you pour, how you price it, how you present it, and whether anyone on your staff can actually talk about it.
Every restaurant we visit gets rated on six metrics. We call them the Wingman Metrics, and they add up to one of four badges. We're going to walk you through all of it right here, because we'd rather you build something great than catch you off guard.
This isn't a checklist from a consulting firm. It's what we actually look for when we sit down at your bar and open the wine list. Think of it as the friend who works in the industry telling you what they'd do if it were their restaurant.
The Four Badges
The Rager
An exceptional wine program. The list is interesting, the pricing is fair, the staff knows their stuff, and you can tell someone put real thought into every bottle on that page. This is the restaurant we tell everyone about. Worth traveling for.
The Wild Card
Exciting finds and unique selections. Maybe the list is small but every bottle is a gem. Maybe there's a wildly good by-the-glass pour next to a few head-scratchers. High reward, a little inconsistent. We dig the energy.
The Reliable
Solid program. Good selections, fair pricing, nothing that makes you wince. You won't discover anything new, but you won't get burned either. A lot of good restaurants live here, and there's no shame in it.
The Lazy List
The wine list is an afterthought. Overpriced, boring, or neglected. These are the programs where someone called a distributor rep, said “just send me whatever,” and never looked at it again. Your guests deserve better. You can do better.
The Six Wingman Metrics
This is exactly what we evaluate. No secrets, no gotchas.
1. List Variety
Deep & Eclectic · Solid Range · Plays It Safe · Grocery Store
This is the big one. Your wine list is a reflection of your taste, your curiosity, and your respect for the people sitting at your tables.
A great list doesn't need to be huge. Ten bottles that are carefully chosen beat fifty bottles that a distributor rep picked for you. And that's the real trap: your rep is working a quota. They're incentivized to move volume, not to curate your identity. If your list reads like a greatest-hits sampler from one distributor's book, your guests notice. Maybe not consciously, but they feel the sameness.
Mix it up. Work with more than one distributor. Throw in a bottle from a region your guests haven't heard of. Put a Greek Assyrtiko next to your Chardonnay. Stock a Portuguese red nobody can pronounce. These are the bottles that start conversations, and conversations are what keep people at the table longer.
If you're a steakhouse, great. You need Cabernet. But you don't need four Napa Cabs and nothing else. Give us a Malbec from Cahors, a Ribera del Duero, a Barossa Shiraz. Show us you've actually tasted things.
2. Markup Fairness
Fair · Steep · Gouge
We know you have to make money on wine. We respect that. A 2.5-3x markup on bottles is industry standard and nobody should complain about it.
Where it goes sideways: charging $18 for a glass of wine that retails at $10 a bottle. Pricing a $12 wholesale bottle at $65 on the list. Marking up well-known wines aggressively because you think customers won't price-check. They do. Especially now.
The restaurants that win here price their wine so people actually order it. Fair markup on bottles, reasonable pours by the glass, and maybe a half-price wine night or an industry-night deal. You make more money when people drink more wine. And people drink more wine when they don't feel robbed.
3. Staff Knowledge
Knowledgeable & Friendly · Willing but Green · Gatekeeper · MIA
Your servers are your wine program's last mile. A great list with a staff that can't speak to it is like a Ferrari with no one who knows how to drive it.
We're not expecting every server to be a sommelier. “Willing but Green” is perfectly fine. If someone says “I'm not sure, but let me find out,” that's great. What tanks a score: servers who clearly haven't tasted anything on the list, or who default to the most expensive bottle without asking what you like.
Run a tasting for your staff once a month. Let them try the wines. Give them two or three talking points per bottle. That small investment pays for itself every time a server confidently recommends a glass and the guest says yes.
4. Glassware
Varietal Specific · Stemless Casual · Red Flag
Glassware is the silent signal. It tells your guest how seriously you take wine before they taste a single drop.
You don't need Riedel Sommeliers at $50 a stem. Good, thin-lipped stemware with a decent bowl works. Even stemless is fine for a casual concept, as long as it's clean, appropriate, and not a juice glass.
The red flag: serving a $60 bottle in the same thick-rimmed glass you use for water. If you're charging wine-list prices, the glass should feel like it belongs with the wine. It doesn't have to be expensive. It just has to not be embarrassing.
5. Specials & Deals
Active Program · Occasional · Set & Forget
Half-price wine night. A rotating by-the-glass feature. A sommelier's pick of the week. A wine flight paired with your tasting menu. These things tell us you're actively working your wine program, not just maintaining it.
The restaurants that score highest here treat wine like a living, breathing part of the experience. They rotate. They experiment. They give guests a reason to come back and see what's new.
And here's the business case: wine specials drive traffic on slow nights. A well-promoted half-price bottle night fills seats on a Tuesday. A featured pairing upsells an appetizer into a wine sale. Wine isn't just margin. It's a marketing tool.
6. Storage & Temperature
Proper · Acceptable · Hot Mess
We check. White wine should be cold. Red wine should not be warm. If you're storing bottles next to the kitchen heat lamp, we're going to notice.
Proper storage doesn't require a $20,000 wine room. A temperature-controlled cooler, a spot away from direct heat and light, and serving whites and sparkling at the right temperature covers 90% of it. The last 10% is caring enough to check.
The Part Nobody Else Will Tell You
Your guests are more adventurous than you think. The restaurant industry has this persistent belief that customers only want safe, familiar wines. That if you don't stock Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay and Meiomi Pinot Noir, people will revolt. That's not true. It was barely true ten years ago and it's definitely not true now.
Your guests will be a function of your offerings. Stock interesting wine and you attract people who want interesting wine. Stock boring wine and you attract people who want boring wine, and those people don't spend as much, don't come back as often, and don't tell their friends about you.
Don't just take your distributor rep's recommendation at face value. They have targets to hit. They're going to push whatever they're overstocked on or whatever earns them the best commission. That doesn't make them bad people. It makes them salespeople. Your job is to be the curator, not the customer.
Taste everything before it goes on your list. Ask for samples. Work with importers who specialize in smaller producers. Visit a wine shop you admire and ask what they'd put on a 20-bottle restaurant list. The people who geek out about wine will geek out about helping you build a great program.
Five Moves That Immediately Improve Your Wine Program
Add one wine nobody's heard of. A Portuguese red, a Greek white, an Austrian Grüner Veltliner. Just one. Put it at a great price. Watch what happens when your servers get excited about recommending it.
Run a monthly staff tasting. Open three bottles. Let everyone taste. Give them two sentences to describe each wine. Your staff's confidence is your program's confidence.
Start a half-price wine night. Pick your slowest night. Offer bottles at half off. You fill seats, you move inventory, you build a reputation as the place where wine is accessible. It costs you almost nothing because those seats were empty anyway.
Check your glass temperature. Right now. Walk to your bar and feel the white wine. If it's not cold, fix it today. This is the lowest-effort, highest-impact move on the list.
Put a story on the list. Pick one wine and add a single line about it. “From a family estate in Sicily's Mount Etna region. Volcanic soil, old vines, tastes like nowhere else.” People buy stories. Give them one.
Ready to show us what you've got?
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