Wine in the hotel restaurant: inventory by the bottle, sales by the glass and the margin lost at the table

The bottle of white wine was opened at seven in the evening to pour a glass. By midnight, when the bar closes, the bottle is still in the cellar with almost half of it left, but the hotel restaurant’s report says five glasses were sold from that bottle and only four were charged. The difference is not a mystery: it is a bottle nobody tracked between the first glass poured and the last.

Wine by the glass: the promise and the problem

Selling wine by the glass is good news for the guest: they can try a pricier wine without committing to the whole bottle. For the hotel restaurant it is a high margin source, because a bottle sold by the glass usually leaves more than the same bottle sold whole. The problem shows up when that sale does not get recorded glass by glass, but gets estimated from memory at the end of the night.

Unlike a dish, a bottle of wine is not prepared every time it sells: it gets opened once and from there several independent sales happen, each at a different moment, sometimes at different outlets if the same bottle supplies both the dining room bar and table service. That trait is exactly what makes it easy to lose control of, if the system does not account for it.

How many glasses a bottle should yield

The first number a hotel restaurant needs, and almost never has in writing, is the expected yield of each bottle: how many glasses of a defined size come out of a 750 milliliter bottle. With 150 milliliter glasses, a bottle yields five full glasses; with 125 milliliter glasses, it yields six.

That theoretical yield is the benchmark everything else gets measured against. If a bottle should yield five glasses and the bar only charged for three, either two glasses were poured and not charged, poured over the standard size, or spilled. Without that number defined ahead of time, there is no way to know whether the actual yield is right or wrong.

Yield is not the same for every wine. A sparkling wine loses more volume to foam when poured, and a higher proof wine sometimes gets served in smaller glasses. Defining yield by label, not a generic number for “wine”, is what makes the comparison fair.

Uncorking: why an open bottle needs its own record

The moment a bottle is opened to sell by the glass, it stops being a closed inventory item and becomes a container of glasses waiting to be sold. If the system does not mark that moment, inventory keeps counting the bottle as a whole unit until someone writes it off, long after it was already poured.

Recording the uncorking means noting, at the moment the bottle is opened, which bottle it is, at which outlet and with what expected yield. From there, every glass sold gets deducted from that yield, and when the bottle runs out or gets written off past its shelf life, the system can compare what was poured against what was expected.

Without that record, wine inventory gets checked by counting physical bottles against what the system says, and a half full bottle tells nobody anything: it could have been open for two days or two hours, it could have yielded three sold glasses and two comped ones, or it could look that way because someone poured themselves a glass without charging it. A recorded uncorking is the only way to tell those cases apart.

Comps and free pours: the discount nobody sees

Wine is, along with alcoholic drinks in general, one of the products a server gives away most: a glass to apologize for a wait, a comp glass for a regular guest, a glass the manager offers to close out a complaint. None of those decisions is wrong on its own; what is wrong is that it does not get recorded as what it is.

When the comp is poured from the open bottle without capturing it in the system, two things lie at once: that bottle’s yield looks lower than it really is, because a glass that was in fact poured is missing, and the month’s comp report does not include that gift, because it was never recorded as one. The manager ends up not knowing how much wine is really given away, and the controller cannot ask about something that shows up in no report.

A wine comp should be captured the same as any other: as a sale with a hundred percent discount reason, authorized by whoever has permission to do it. That way it deducts from the bottle’s yield the same as a charged glass, and it shows up in the discount report with its reason, not as a glass that simply disappeared.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are invented to show the calculation; they are not from any hotel. A bottle of red wine costs 450 and yields five 150 milliliter glasses, each sold at 180. If all five glasses sell and get charged, that bottle’s sale is 5 × 180 = 900, with a cost of 450, that is a margin of 450, or 50 % of the sale.

Now imagine that of those five glasses, one was poured as a recorded comp (cost 90, no revenue) and one was poured but never captured in the system due to a server’s oversight. Recorded sales would be only 3 × 180 = 540, even though the whole bottle was in fact poured. The gap between the 900 the bottle should have generated and the 540 actually charged is 360: 90 belongs to the comp, which is at least explained in the report, and 270 is a glass nobody will be able to explain.

If this happens with just one bottle a week in a restaurant pouring fifteen different labels by the glass, the unrecorded loss can approach 270 × 15 = 4,050 a month, with no report ever flagging it as a problem, because each bottle on its own looks like “just one glass”.

Wine at banquets and groups: the bottle served a different way

At a wedding or a corporate event, wine almost never sells by the glass: it gets calculated by the bottle based on the number of guests, and it is often already included in the banquet package price. Here the risk is not glass pouring, it is that actual bottle consumption never gets compared against what the event contract budgeted.

If the package included one bottle for every four guests and the event ended up opening one bottle for every three, someone needs to know whether that was a decision made in the ballroom, pouring more generously than agreed, or a lack of control in service. Without a record of how many bottles were opened and when, that question has no answer, and the hotel absorbs the cost of the difference without anyone having decided to. The groups and banquets page explains how consumption is tracked inside an event with a closed price (Groups and banquets).

What the controller should see in the shift close

The shift close for an outlet that sells wine by the glass should show, bottle by bottle, how many glasses sold, how many were comped and why, and how many are still pending in the open bottle. That level of detail is what lets the controller compare actual yield against the expected one without waiting for a full physical inventory.

It should also show which bottles have been open longer than they should, because an open wine loses quality with the days and that cost is also a loss, even if not a single extra glass ever gets poured. The guide to the shift close by outlet explains how to build this report for any product sold by a smaller unit than the one it is purchased in (A guide to the shift close by revenue center in a hotel).

With that report, the conversation with the bar stops being “I think we are missing wine” and becomes a specific question: the bottle of that label, opened Tuesday, should show four glasses sold and shows two. That question does have an answer.

Common mistakes when controlling wine by the glass

• Not defining an expected yield by label and comparing every bottle against a generic number that fits none of them.
• Recording a wine comp as a glass that simply was not charged, instead of as a discount with a reason and an authorization.
• Letting the server guess by eye how many glasses are left in an open bottle instead of deducting every sold glass from the recorded yield.
• Not writing off open bottles that have already lost quality, and letting them sit in inventory weeks after they stopped being sellable.
• At banquets, not comparing actual bottle consumption against what the event contract budgeted.

What to do this week

1. Define the expected glass yield for your ten most frequent by the glass labels, based on the glass size you use for each one.
2. Check with the bar how a freshly opened bottle gets recorded today, and whether the system tells apart a closed bottle from one in service by the glass.
3. Ask the team to record every wine comp as a discount with a reason, no exceptions, even for a single glass.
4. Review last week’s shift close and compare, bottle by bottle, glasses sold against expected yield.
5. At your next banquet event, compare the number of bottles opened against what the contract budgeted and document any difference.

In Inn Restaurant every bottle opened for by the glass sales gets recorded with its expected yield, every glass sold is deducted from that bottle and every comp is captured with a reason and an authorization, all visible in the same bar shift close (Cash and shift close). If you want to see how your wine list’s control would look, the 15 minute demo is booked at (contact).