Count by bin, not by name
Give every wine a bin number and put it on the wine list, the shelf and the POS button. Counting “bin 140, three” beats squinting at a label and spelling Gewürztraminer on a clipboard, and it stops two vintages of the same wine blurring into one row.
Open bottles in tenths
An open bottle behind the bar counts in tenths, the same as spirits. 0.4 of a 750 ml bottle is about 10 oz: one and a half 6 oz glasses. Dark glass makes this harder; hold it up to a light. Write it down with the sealed bottles: 3.4 is three sealed and one open at four tenths.
Turn glass sales into bottles
Twelve 6 oz glasses is 72 oz, or 2.8 bottles of a 750 ml. Add bottles sold whole, and you have what sales account for. Set it against what the count says you used, and the difference is what went into tastes, heavy pours, spoiled bottles and glasses that never got rung.
Where by-the-glass pours go
- Heavy pours. A 6 oz pour that's really 7 turns a four-glass bottle into three and a half. A marked carafe or a pour line on the glass fixes it.
- Tastes. Offering a taste is good service. Ring it as a no-charge item so it shows up instead of disappearing.
- Spoilage. An open bottle that turns before it sells is a whole bottle of loss. Watch which wines by the glass are slow and pour fewer of them, or preserve them.
- Wrong button. A glass rung as the house wine when you poured the reserve makes one bin short and the other long by the same amount.
Price it right
The wine by the glass calculator gives glasses per bottle, cost per glass and the glass price that hits your pour cost target, with room for what's lost from each bottle.