House wines can be very good indeed. They can also be appalling. The cheapest bottle of wine on the menu plays an interesting role in any restaurant and can say quite a lot about that particular restaurant’s ethos. If you’re in a Michelin starred palace of food, I’ll wager that house wine will be superb. If you’re at a cut-price eatery looking for a quick meal, I’m betting it won’t be. Of course, there’s a world in between, and this is where many of us live. It’s this situation I’d like to briefly mention.
Many people are put off by the notion of buying a house wine, especially if they are eating with friends and want to appear magnanimous. The standard reaction, in this situation, is to opt for the wine directly above the house wine – the next cheapest, as it were.
It is important also to recognise particular reactions that can be manipulated. Again, this is a perfectly valid way of going about things if it has served you well in the past. However, it is also important to realise that it’s not just you doing this and that you haven’t single-handedly cracked the system. Many restaurants place their highest margin wine in this position in order to drive sales with the many people who choose in exactly this way.
Many years ago, when working for the now-defunct Threshers, we were preached to about the virtues of the ‘Power Shelf’. This was the shelf which sat at eye-level amongst a wall full of wine. For the less selective customer a bottle placed here and covered in point-of-sale was the end of the search. Yet again, however, it was also the highest margin bottles placed on this shelf. It didn’t make them bad quality, it just made them high-margin.
Judge yourself whether or not your restaurant is looking to make a statement with a house wine. If it is, so much the better. If it isn’t and you’re looking only at the cost, that’s fine too. The same applies to automatically choosing the second bottle. The point of this post is not to give you hard and fast rules to live by, but merely to point out that some gut decisions can be a bit predictable…
