A wine list is a

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to the customer. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose, often with prices shown – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-est ...

wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

selections for purchase, typically in a

restaurant A restaurant is an establishment that prepares and serves food and drinks to customers. Meals are generally served and eaten on the premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and Delivery (commerce), food delivery services. Restaurants ...

setting. A restaurant may include a list of available wines on its main menu, but usually provides a separate menu just for wines. Wine lists in the form of

tasting menu A tasting menu is a collection of several dishes in small portions, served by a restaurant as a single meal. The French name for a tasting menu is . Some restaurants and chefs specialize in tasting menus, while in other cases, it is a special o ...

s and wines for purchase are also offered by

wineries A winery is a building or property that produces wine, or a business involved in the cultivation and production of wine, such as a wine company. Some wine companies own many wineries. Besides wine making equipment, larger wineries may also feat ...

and wine stores. A restaurant's

sommelier A ''sommelier'' ( , , ), ''chef de vin'' or wine steward, is a trained and knowledgeable wine professional, normally working in fine restaurants, who specializes in all aspects of wine service as well as wine and food pairing. The role of the ''s ...

is usually in charge of assembling the wine list, educating the staff about wine, and assisting customers with their wine selections. Wine lists have been found from ancient

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

ian times. Ancient wine lists were not created for the same purpose served by a menu, but rather as a means of recording inventory and administrating wine rations in a monarch's household.

Organization

A wine list is typically organized into sections. A restaurant offering few selections may organize its list in two groups (red wine and white wine) whereas a larger wine list may have several sections, including any of the following: *

White wine White wine is a wine that is Fermentation in winemaking, fermented without undergoing the process of Maceration (wine), maceration, which involves prolonged contact between the juice with the grape skins, seeds, and pulp. The wine color, colou ...

s *

Red wine Red wine is a type of wine made from dark-colored grape varieties - (red grapes.) The color of the wine can range from intense violet, typical of young wines, through to brick red for mature wines and brown for older red wines. The juice fro ...

s *

Rosé wine A rosé () is a type of wine that incorporates some of the color from the grape skins, but not enough to qualify it as a red wine. It may be the oldest known type of wine, as it is the most straightforward to make with the skin contact method ...

s *

Dessert wine Dessert wines, sometimes called pudding wines in the United Kingdom, are sweet wines typically served with dessert. There is no simple definition of a dessert wine. In the UK, a dessert wine is considered to be any sweet wine drunk with a mea ...

s *Sections or subcategories by

varietal A varietal wine is a wine made primarily from a single named grape variety, and which typically displays the name of that variety on the wine label.The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000.winepros.com.au. ...

*Sections organized by

wine-producing region Wines are produced in significant growing regions where vineyards are planted. Wine grapes berries mostly grow between the 30th and the 50th degrees of latitude, in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, typically in regions of Mediterranean ...

or country *Locally produced or specialty wines

Pricing

Next to the description of each wine selection, a wine list displays the price of wine purchased by the bottle or by the glass. Typically a restaurant sets the price of a single glass of wine to recover their purchase cost on the entire bottle. The industry average price markup for bottles of wine ranges from 2.5–3 times the establishment's wholesale cost. A wine list may also disclose a corkage fee for patrons who bring their own wine, in establishments and countries where this is customary. The corkage fee is intended to cover the profit the restaurant would have earned had it sold the customer a wine.

Format

Wine lists have traditionally been implemented in paper, usually protected by some kind of cover like the ones seen on the normal restaurant menus. This kind of implementation usually leads to some entries being unavailable due to stock issues, since business owners are unlikely to change the wine list daily. Recently, a growing trend in the restaurant industry has been to adopt digital wine lists, presenting it to patrons on tablets and similar devices. Besides the efficiency gains on running the restaurant's wine list, these digital devices are able to monitor the patron's behavior and preferences, allowing restaurant managers and

s to access deep insight about their customer, pricing impact, and other factors.

References

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