Should you ever make it to my office, it becomes apparent very quickly that I’m a very unorganized person. In an effort to remedy this, you can often find the outside of my computer laden with an assortment of Post-It Note reminders reminding me to do everything from paying bills, to emails I need to send, or in the case of the only permanent Post-It.. to update my website a minimum of three times per week.

At the slowest of times, that can be a serious challenge. To keep up with the likes of Camper English’s Alcademics, or fellow Canadian Darcy O’Neil, and his Fix the Pumps project, can be an uphill battle for sure — throw in the hundreds of other full time cocktail blogs spanning the internet, and Cocktails and Cordials quickly falls to the wayside.

But my greatest challenge, in my opinion, is the cause of an advantage that most cocktail bloggers have neglected — I’m a full time bartender and Bar Manager here in Niagara Falls. Why don’t you see this website updated nearly as often as the others? I’m so incredibly lucky to spend 60 hours per week in a bar still, 40 or so of those hours being behind the wood full time. Over the course of the past few weeks my time for Cocktails and Cordials has drastically declined, and I’m only just beginning to find more time to devote to online cocktails.

What’s taking up my time now? After an exhausting few months of setbacks, delays, and disheartening slowdowns with construction, we are getting very close to launching the second bar and restaurant for Johnny Rocco’s Italian Grill (if you’re American.. Carabba’s is a very similar concept) here in St. Catharines, Ontario. The next few days will be devoted to unpacking countless cases of glassware, and receiving a $50K wine and liquor order, and I couldn’t be more excited.

I’m going to do my best to keep you posted with our progress, but for the time being.. thank you so much for your patience. I have plenty of very exciting news to share with you over the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned!

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When I talk about romancing cocktails, keep in mind I’m not referring to the names of the ‘Between the Sheets’, and ‘Flirtini’s of the drink world. Instead, romancing is an often overlooked art of creating cocktail menus for bars and restaurants. Back to the business aspect of running a bar, “knowing your customer” recognizes that, unless you work in the super-speakeasies and cocktail lounges of the world, the majority of your guests don’t understand a lot of flavour combinations hiding behind your bar.

Because of this, a simple listing of cocktail ingredients will no longer suffice in selling your creations.

For food, a simple listing of ingredients still has a place, as the average customer has a fairly complex understanding of the flavours of many culinary ingredients. How many of your guests have tasted Green Chartreuse and Galliano together before? Have they even heard of both liqueurs? The name of ingredients becomes less important in describing cocktails as guests will more easily recognize the flavours of herbs, spices, anise, and vanilla.

Quality cocktail lounges are rare in the world, and so too are the guests who will have a deep understanding of the quality ingredients us bartenders are working with on a regular basis. Sure, the cocktails on my menu contain Rhubarb, Celery, and Boker’s bitters (and of course, Angostura), but they have no place on a cocktail menu where their appearance would simply confuse my guests.

If the guest is curious to learn more, the bartender would be more than happy to go further into depth about our ingredients and our approach to creating quality cocktails, but for the ones who stick strictly to reading the cocktail menu, here are a few tips to put the romance back into your cocktails.

Emphasize flavours, rather than names of products. As I stated before, your guests are more familiar with flavours then they are with specific spirits and liqueurs. It may be very easy for them to recognize vanilla flavours, but they might not have ever heard of Navan before.

Offering something unique? Tell me About it. Maybe your bar has begun to explore the caviars and foams of the molecular mixology world. Great. Does your guest know what you’re talking about when you say “topped with raspberry caviar” ? If I think you’re talking about fish eggs, that sounds pretty repulsive to me in a cocktail.

There’s a specific opportunity in cutting edge techniques that requires you to go further in depth in explanations, and even embellish. Try,

“To finish your cocktail, our bar scientists have worked tirelessly to trap fresh berries in spheres that burst with flavour in your mouth”

I think that sounds a lot more enticing in the description of that cocktail.

Does calling by name and listing ingredients serve your best interest? While flavours are the most important in romancing your cocktail, if you’re offering a unique or rare spirit or ingredient in your cocktail, it’s presence in the description makes it just as important. By remaining vague on other ingredients, it leaves you open to tinker and perfect your cocktails as time passes, without the need to reprint.

If the cocktail’s good enough to make it on a list, be proud of it. Gloat. Your guest has chosen your bar for a specific reason, and it could very well be that your “Cara Mia Strawberry Sour” is the best cocktail they’ve ever had. If you are confident enough to put a particular cocktail on your menu, your description of that cocktail should mirror that confidence. It gives your guests piece of mind when choosing their drink, and your bartender’s a level of excellence to aspire to.

For an example of cocktail romancing in action, I’m very proud to present Johnny Rocco’s New Cocktail Menu.

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By far, one of the most daunting tasks for anyone setting up a bar (money aside) can very well be the creation of a wine list. The fact is, for the number of bars and restaurants in the world, there are nowhere near enough qualified wine experts and sommeliers to be employed by everyone. Besides that, the cost of commissioning someone specifically to pick your wines can be a very expensive endeavour.

For the bars that don’t employ these experts, what will typically end up happening is either the owner will be in charge of wines, or the bar manager – who, like me, could likely have very little formal experience with wines. But that doesn’t mean your wine list will have to suffer.

As I’ve worked on our wine and cocktail program over the past few weeks (and indeed it has taken more than a couple weeks to put together a quality list), I’ve developed a few questions for you to ask yourself when it comes time to update your own wine program.

1) Who are your guests? (Regions & Varietals)
It’s been no secret in business for years that to be successful, you must understand, anticipate, and then meet the customer’s needs. I think it’s fair to say that most bars have almost completely thrown this advice out the window over the years. Instead, items appearing on both cocktail menus and wine lists have been generalized as a means of serving the lowest common denominator, rather than instead tailoring things to what the guest really wanted.

It’s not just your proximity, price point, or service that help your guest determine where they want to eat. The theme, atmosphere, and the style of cuisine offered are where more guests place their value when determining their bar or restaurant choice. If you’re an Italian bar or restaurant, serving exclusively Italian cuisine, why are half of your wine offerings Australian? If your guests are visiting because they want to eat Italian food, it only makes sense to place more value on the wines that compliment your style of cuisine.

In addition, should you be located in a tourist destination (for example, here in Niagara Falls), it’s important to think locally, if possible. We’re located in a rapidly growing wine region, and we attract millions of tourists every year, many of which take the opportunity to visit some of our local wineries. It doesn’t make sense to not put a focus on some of the outstanding local wines from Niagara. For the tourists, the type of cuisine isn’t the most important – they didn’t come to Niagara Falls to eat Italian food. They came to Niagara Falls to experience everything we have to offer, including our wines, they’ve just been kind enough to stop in our restaurant to explore the local options we have. Keep that in mind.

2) What do your guests already know? (How to overcome big-brand domination)
In fear of trying something new, the dominant Yellow Tail-type brands of the world prosper in bars and restaurants because many wine lists will exclusively offer what they know is already selling, regardless of where it’s from, or the quality of the product.

Most guests can recognize the name “Yellow Tail” on a wine list, and will order it – not based on quality of the wine, but on the name the brand has established for itself through worldwide marketing, and a distinctive yellow label. Maybe they’ve never had a great Syrah, or South African Shiraz – the onus should be on the establishment to help introduce them to it.

The big name brands have a place on wine lists, but should be there as a means of offering guests an “easy way out” if they’re intimidated by the wines you offer. The discount brands should then be offered, bottle only, at a premium, as a means of driving sales back to the superior, less expensive, house wines. By focusing on quality rather than brand name, you can increase the perceived value and the return on your wine list.

3) What level of quality is your clientele willing to pay for? (Pricing)
Pricing can be a very difficult area to approach when it comes to wine. Industry standard is about 200-250% markup on wines, but I’ve worked in places it reached upwards of 300%. Currently our highest markup is about 100% at Johnny Rocco’s, with most wines being substantially less than that. If your establishment has high turnover, making $15 – $20 off of a bottle might be all that you need, but for many it’s much higher than that.

Because of this, it’s important that your house pours represent a good range of varietals and prices. To some, the motivation in choosing a glass of wine could very well be exclusively focused on the price, and that works for you in both ways. Some guests will automatically opt for the least expensive option, not focused on the type of wine but instead choosing something that’s going to be easy, and cheap to sip on for the night. Inversely, there are also the guests for whom quality is synonymous with price – the most expensive wine is the best on the list, and again without any attention to varietal, is the wine they’ll drink all night.

Between these highs and lows is where you’ll find more room to play with a range of varietals. A range of 6-7 reds by the glass and 5-6 whites can often carry most of the major wine varietals, and can satisfy the requests of most wine drinkers at your bar. Providing a range of options to your guests ensures that you are able to satisfy needs with quality, rather than just brand name.

4) Who’s working for who? (Working with sales reps and suppliers)
Finally, a little bit of the “what’s in it for me / the bar”. There’s plenty of great wines to suit your bar, and most of those wines are likely accompanied by a local sales rep, willing to work with you to get as many of their wines as possible on your list. Generally speaking, the more product from a particular distributors portfolio that makes it onto your bar means the higher incentive that you receive in return. But do you really want your list to carry all 20 of the Wolf Blass line of products? Probably not.

It’s important to work with many suppliers, working out the best products and the best deals you can manage in order to bring your bar the biggest return. But before you commit to a wine, even if you’re not pouring it by the glass, taste it! My wine collection has nearly tripled in the past few weeks because of the number of tastings I’ve sat through with my bar’s reps. Regardless of the marketing, or cash incentives a particular product is offering, if you don’t like the taste, there’s no reason it should be offered within your bar. Likewise, if your sales rep can’t bring one bottle that you are potentially going to sell cases of, why should you deal with that wine, or that rep? They want your business, not the other way around.

When it comes time to launch that list, your rep better be making an appearance to walk your staff through tastings, and educating them on how to properly sell their wine. Regardless of whatever deals your reps are offering, it’s important to remind from time to time that their product’s place in your bar is a privilege that can be revoked at any time for any reason, especially if it’s not moving fast enough.

So what do you take away from this? Taste everything, provide your guests with value, and build relationships on both sides of the bar that will help sustain your list in the long run, and I promise you’ll be successful.

If you have experience on setting up your own wine list, I would love to hear from you below. If you’re within Ontario and interested in learning about the reps that we work with at Johnny Rocco’s, I would be more than happy to send some information your way! Our new wine and cocktail list launches Monday, December 7th, 2009.

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For those of you that visit Cocktails and Cordials regularly, you’ve likely noticed a lack of recent updates on both the blog and on twitter, and I do want to apologize for that. The tardiness on my part has been the result of more than a month’s worth of bar preparation for the St. Catharines, Ontario location for Johnny Rocco’s Italian Grill, which we will be opening on Monday, December 7th.

In taking on the role and responsibilities associated with the title of “Bar Manager” earlier this year, I was more than a little hesitant. A move to management for any bartender is an almost guaranteed pay cut, but depending on how you spend your time, you may just be able to leverage your role to make both you and your bar substantially more money. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share the experience I’ve had in setting up our St. Catharines location, and show you how to approach opening your own bar.

If you have any questions, I’d love to spend some time answering them here on the website. Send an email to nick@cocktailsandcordials.com, and I’d be more than happy to help.

For now, I leave you with Part 1: The Cost of Going Fresh. Interested in making the big switch from pre-mix to fresh cocktails? Click here to read why you can’t afford not to.

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