Managing wine inventory
Wine breaks the assumptions behind most inventory routines: expensive, slow-moving and hard to count. What to track closely, and what to leave alone.
A wine program breaks most of the assumptions behind ordinary restaurant inventory. Food turns quickly and is worth little per unit. Wine turns slowly, is worth a great deal per bottle, and a single mistake can be worth more than a day's food waste.
Cash sitting in a cellar
The first thing to be clear-eyed about is that a cellar is working capital in liquid form. A deep list is a genuine part of the experience and a genuine constraint on the money available to run the restaurant, and those two facts have to be held together.
- ✓Know what the cellar is worth, not just what is in it. Most restaurants can list their wines and cannot state the number.
- ✓Watch the slow end. Bottles that have not moved in a year are a decision, not a collection.
- ✓Separate the list into what sells and what signals. Both are legitimate; only one is inventory in the working sense.
- ✓Be honest about depth versus cash. A list that impresses sommeliers and immobilises your cash is a choice with a cost.
Counting what actually needs counting
Counting an entire cellar monthly is how wine inventory becomes a task everyone dreads and eventually skips. The value is concentrated: a minority of your bottles carry most of the money and most of the movement.
Count those frequently and the long tail rarely. A weekly count of the by-the-glass selection and your fastest-moving bottles catches nearly everything that matters, and it takes a fraction of the time — which is why it survives contact with a busy month.
Rarely theft of a rare bottle. Usually by-the-glass pours running heavy, tastings poured and never rung, a corked bottle nobody logged, and breakage that felt too small to mention. All four are recordable, and none of them is.
By the glass is a different product
By-the-glass wine behaves like spirits, not like bottles: pour accuracy drives cost, and a heavy hand across a service is a real number. It also spoils, which bottles on a shelf do not — an opened bottle that does not sell is waste on a clock.
Treat the by-the-glass list as a separate inventory discipline with tighter counting, measured pours and an honest view of what you are pouring away at the end of a slow night.
Pricing a list that moves
Wine pricing rewards contribution margin thinking more than percentage thinking. A fixed multiplier across a list prices entry-level bottles attractively and prestige bottles out of the market, which is how restaurants end up with a beautiful upper list that never sells and cash locked in it.
Sliding the margin down as the bottle price rises usually sells more of the expensive wine and returns more cash per bottle than a uniform markup — but check it against your own mix rather than taking it on faith.
How this works in Opero
Inventory in Opero sits on the same spine as orders, so what was sold drives expected usage rather than being reconciled from a separate system, and par levels live alongside the stock they govern. Recipe costing covers by-the-glass pours the same way it covers a cocktail, which is what makes the pour-accuracy question measurable rather than anecdotal.
Inventory, recipe costing and par levels are on the Growth plan and above.
See inventory and costing on the order spine.
Explore inventoryFrequently asked questions
- How often should we count wine?
- Weekly on the by-the-glass selection and the fastest-moving bottles; far less often on the slow tail. A full cellar count monthly is how the discipline collapses — the value is concentrated, so concentrate the effort.
- Should wine use the same markup as food?
- Usually not a uniform one. A fixed multiplier prices prestige bottles out of the market and locks cash in a list nobody buys; sliding the margin down as bottle price rises tends to sell more and return more cash per bottle.
- Where does wine actually go missing?
- Heavy by-the-glass pours, unrung tastings, corked bottles nobody logged, and unrecorded breakage — in roughly that order. All four are recordable, which is why the variance is usually explainable once you start logging them.
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