REPORT FROM ITALY—In Italy, a country where gastronomy represents a traditional tourist attraction, hotel restaurants’ wine lists are regarded not only as ambassadors of the properties’ style, but also as an investment that needs special care because of its relevant impact on budgets.
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“A wine list plays an important role, suggesting the identity of the restaurant,” said Paolo Milani, sommelier at the Four Seasons Hotel Milan. He is in charge of 280 different wines and three food-and-beverage outlets. Federico Galligani, restaurant manager of Vivendo at the St. Regis Grand Hotel, Rome, said the wine list conveys a hotel’s care and commitment to quality and the corporate image.
“It has to be updated, with sold-out vintages replaced, always correct, in order,” he said. “It has to be alive.”
A long-term investment
A well-designed and up-to-date wine list accounts for a considerable portion of a hotel’s F&B costs because of the risk of defective bottles, waste and surplus, along with the fact that some wines are bought today but will be kept to be sold years in the future.
“In any company, unsold stock represents economic weights, and in this perspective, wine is a hot topic: A cellar’s value depends on the number and nature of its references,” said Galligani, who considers wine a remarkable investment. “Some bottles raise their value in the course of time. This is why an annual inventory revaluation of the warehouse should be implemented. It can add value to the property, too.”
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| Onice Lounge at Hotel Villa La Vedetta |
There are nearly 24,000 bottles stored in the cellar of Siriola, the restaurant at the Hotel Ciasa Salares in S. Cassiano, which has a turnover of 8,900 bottles a year, according to Stefan Wieser, hotelier and manager of an encyclopaedic 1,900-wines-list.
Wine accounts for 20 percent of the restaurant costs, according to Paolo Milani e Andrea Luxoro, general manger of the 18-room Hotel Villa La Vedetta in Florence.
“A Flotentine steak (large grilled beef steak) is less expensive than a bottle of wine,” he said. “Without considering the banquets, it is very hard to forecast the wine consumption and it is crucial to manage properly the unsold (bottles).”
Different lists for different needs
The design of a hotel’s wine list is a matter of choice, and the best selection is the one that fits the hotel’s needs, according to the hoteliers interviewed. St. Regis Grand Hotel is a five-star property in central Rome, with a gourmet restaurant, a lounge bar and roomservice,.
“For the bar, we have arranged a selection of wines more suitable to be offered by glass, while the Vivendo restaurant has 600 different labels from all over the world, mainly Italian and French,” Galligani said of the five-star St. Regis Grand Hotel, which includes a gourmet restaurant, a lounge bar and roomservice.
“Unlike many other restaurants, we have listed the wines according to the grapes they are made with. It is a rich, but understandable list, where it is possible to compare wines, with a selections of affordable products between 30 and 40 Euros—a choice not due to the crisis, but rather a philosophy we pursued from the beginning.”
If top-quality international wines are a must in every high-end hotel, in locations where travelers look for a stronger link with a specific territory, special attention is paid to local productions: 400 wines, with a comprehensive selection from Tuscany, characterize Villa La Vedetta’s wine supply. Fifteen percent of the wines at the Hotel Ciasa Salares are made in Alto Adige.
“All the Italian regions are represented, but there's a huge number of French, German and Austrian wines,” Wieser said. “We are going to purchase mainly European products instead of the new world ones because we are shifting to biodynamic productions. More natural, not so built in a cellar.”
Selection strategies
Manifold wine lists means manifold selection criteria and different management processes, often highly standardized in the big chains’ properties:
“When producers submit new wines, a hotel-staff panel decides if the wines have to be purchased after a blind tasting whose aim is to assure assessments’ independence,” Galligani said. “We want to develop a wine list not too rich of similar bottles, focusing on new denominations and coherent with the hotel philosophy.”
Galligani said he relies on the professional that Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide offers. Meetings are held in Brussels, Belgium, to talk about every wine-related issue.
Blind tastings are used at the Milan’s Four Seasons.
“A pool is in charge with the wine evaluation, while management and price policy is an F&B manager’s task,” Milani said.
The ability to define consumers’ wine attitude, guides and reviews seem to play a significant role in the hotel wine selections, even if hoteliers remark their independence from any publishing company.
“We select quality products, not necessary high-sounding brands,” Milani said. “We work in autonomy with respect to wine guides and often our decisions follow visits to wine estates.”
Andrea Luxoro, general manager, Villa La Vedetta, said wine guides are important when developing wine lists. But Wieser said he is not aligned with any guide when making the wine list.
“I buy following my own ideas, but pressures are real: It is undeniable that interferences exist between some wine guides and some producers,” he said. “Of course, there are guides publishing wine reviews, as well as restaurants and hotels guides and a sort of pressure is obvious, but who surrenders to this blackmail, loses credibility.”
Wine management challenge
From selections to prices and from storage to service, wine management involves different professionals, implies different skills and answers to different needs. Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, which owns the St. Regis brand, developed a new breed of professional, the “wine champion.”
“We believe that a professional orchestrating all the personnel involved in wine management is an important coordination figure,” Galligani said. “This why we outlined the wine champion, whose task is to interact with all the hotel’s departments, addressing to direction, to buyers, able to manage banquets’ surplus, to face storage problems, vintages errors, to deal with guests, to fix prices of a glass of wine. In each Starwood hotel there is at least (one) wine champion; here, in St. Regis, we have three: English speakers, with a hotel vocational training, wine knowledge and waiter service experience because we need something more than a traditional sommelier who suggests wines and opens bottles.”
Aspi, the Italian Professional Sommellerie Association is trying to redefine the role of sommelier because professional sommeliers cannot be just tasters, said Giuseppe Vaccarini, Aspi’s president.
“They must have management responsibilities from budget to purchase, from selection to service,” he said. “In a hotel, the sommelier works together with the F&B’s manager. In Italy, professional sommeliers are still few, but they are highly requested, especially in the hotel sector. Every week we receive many hotel companies’ demands.”
Villa Vedetta has in-house trained personnel, but a sommelier is in charge of the selections, even though the hotel can rely on the advice of external consultants, too.
“The sommelier works in cooperation with a local high-end wine shop whose role is relevant not only during the selection stage, but mainly in the supply process,” Andrea Luxoro said. “This is a small reality with a big list, and this supplier can give us wine on a daily basis exactly the number of bottles we need. In this way we can keep the list always updated. Of course, this system raises the costs compared with hotels that buy directly to the wineries, but it resolves relevant management problems. Moreover, if a guest wants a wine that is not in the list, we can easily find it.”