Sommelier

A sommelier is a beverage specialist who is also, on the floor, one of the restaurant’s better salespeople. Wine is usually the highest-margin thing on the table, and a recommendation that lands raises the check without the guest feeling sold to. Doing it well means guessing correctly about a stranger, and that guess is the one a guest record can take off the table.

How should a restaurant record what a guest drinks?

At the bottle level, on the guest’s record, with producer and vintage. “Likes red wine” is a category rather than a preference. What a sommelier can actually work with is that a guest bought a Barolo at three hundred dollars, sent back a Burgundy once, and starts every visit with Champagne.

Two sources fill that in. The first is the sommelier writing it down after the table, which produces the best detail and the least consistency. The second is the check, and how much it yields depends on the point of sale. Some systems pass item-level detail with the check, so every bottle poured lands on the record with its price. Others send a total by category or a single amount, which tells you a table spent four hundred dollars on beverage and nothing about what it was. Operators tend to assume their POS is doing more than it is, so the answer is worth confirming before anyone builds a wine program on top of it.

Price band is the piece most restaurants never capture and the piece a sommelier most wants. A guest’s usual bottle price is the most useful single number for a first recommendation, and it falls out of check history once bottles are on the record.

Can I see a guest’s wine history across all my restaurants?

Not from the wine list, not from the cellar system, and not from one venue’s point of sale. Inventory software tracks bottles rather than guests. A POS reports what was sold in that venue without connecting it to a person or to what that person drank somewhere else.

Answering it takes the join a restaurant CRM exists to do: the check matched back to the reservation, so the wine is attached to a named guest, and one guest record shared across the group rather than one per venue. For a group with several rooms and one wine director the payoff is concrete. A guest who drinks Chablis at the flagship can be offered it at the sister restaurant on a first visit, and the buying team can see which guests are actually drinking the categories they keep buying.