DLynn Proctor & Chris Collins

Foreign.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. How are we? Good. Fantastic. I am D. Lynn Proctor and I will be your sommelier for the.

There's two things that I love. One is the wine business, and two is amazing food at the best restaurants. And today we have D. Lin from the documentary song that's going to teach us how restaurants can fix one thing and increase their wine penetration, sales and their margins. How to deal with difficult customers and what separates average restaurants to the best of the best and the highest performers.

Okay, so I have made my own wine. And one, I'm curious if you can name the region, the city, the winery, which would be the Bulldog Winery, I guess. And then what you. What you think of it. Okay, so it's the Bulldog wine. Can you get that label? So I made the label myself. I'm going to tell you the year. Is that okay, or should you guess?

Ah, don't tell me the year.

Don't tell you the year.

I want to look at the color. Okay.

Okay, let's do all the stuff we're supposed to do here.

Alrighty.

Your Bulldog wine.

Thin skin, slightly orange. Thin skin, grape variety, slightly red. Orange around the rim. Temperate climate, going to an amber color. Let some of these bubbles get out of here. It's a bit cloudy. Legs are. It's brambly. Incredibly slow. Everybody put your nose in the glass. This wine has a lot of sugar on it. It's got a lot of sugar on the nose. Highly viscous wine smell.

A little bulldog ass.

Red, blue and black fruit. So I get plums and so sweet. Blackberries, cherries, cinnamon, wild raspberry. Not much earth on the wine. Sweet and fruit and forward. Probably seen some oak. Let's go to the palate. Bit tart on the finish. There's vanilla on the wine. It's high acid. I get like some Gary components on it. Weird peach yogurt characteristics. So I'll say socal medium minus complexity. Blended wine. A blend of like Pinot noir, grenache, merlot. 2008 or nine vintage. I'll just say 2008 because it was pretty warm. Nine was a little cooler. And yeah, that's it.

That's amazing.

That's cool.

That's really cool. Give him a round of applause.

Dylan had no idea where my Bulldog wine was from and he nailed it 100%. He picked the year, the region, and the blend perfectly, which is almost like magic that somebody can do that in a blind taste test and kick your.

Boots onto the floor.

I can hardly see.

Nobody in life or in business gets Lucky, you have to work hard, you have to show up early and you have to stay late. And you gotta be better and more dedicated than anybody else around you.

I remember I was always the guy who wanted to go to the restaurant first and open. I was always the guy who wanted all the tables, all the parties, and I was always the guy who stayed later. So guy galley irrelevant. I was always that person. So I made all the money, all the tips, all the bonuses, all the sales goals because I wanted it more than everybody else. Work ethic.

Unhappy customers.

The customer is always right. If they just ordered a thousand dollar bottle of wine and they are unhappy with it, it doesn't matter. I get it off the table and I get them another one, they're always right. So. So hopefully the restaurant or everyone has that plan of loss built into it because you're going to lose things in the kitchen are going to spoil. It's my job to say, well, that was a thousand dollar bottle of wine that you didn't like. I'm saying to myself, there was nothing wrong with it, but they didn't like it. So it's my job to say, well, you know what, I understand that you might not have liked that wine because it had too much tobacco. I might be gaming you right now. It might not be that that wine had too much tobacco. You just didn't like it. So I'll say words like that and say, well, you know what, I'm gonna find you something that has a little bit more vanilla and instead of a thousand, I'll get you something that's $2.50. That way, if you don't like this one, my buds covered a little bit more, but it still helps you feel better about going from 1,000 to 250. So hopefully I'm gaining your trust back.

You know, I go around to a lot of different businesses and the one thing that usually separates the really successful ones from the average performers is mindset. More than anything, they hold themselves to a high standard and they have a passion for what they do with that. What do you see in the wine industry and restaurant industry that separates the really special one from the average?

I love the word. I love the word passion. I think passion is overused a lot. I actually love the word desire more because you can have a passion to do anything. You have a passion to be a bad person. You're just passionate about being awful. True desire, though, desire is something that you live and breathe. That's just what it is. People at their highest, whatever they do, they desire Excellence. There's just a different ethos, a different desire, a different mindset, a different drive.

Doesn't that happen in the wine industry, where a guy loves wine and he becomes a psalm, and then he wants to serve the wine he loves, but it isn't what the patrons. Does that happen a lot?

It happens all too often. And those sommeliers usually find themselves unemployed. Yeah, it's not about you. It's about your demographic. It's about your consumer. It's about your customer. It's about your guest. Much the same, I'm sure, for you guys. Yeah, it's not about what you like. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah. Because I would think in wine, it would happen more because guys get so.

Passionate about it, so excited about. I made this wine last year, and I just want everybody to have it.

Yeah.

Well, A, it doesn't go with the cuisine. B, the chef doesn't like it. C, the owner doesn't like it because he hates the owner of that particular property. And D, it's not your restaurant.

So it's no surprise that the biggest mistake that's made is when you're creating a wine list, is putting wines on there that you love instead of putting wines on there that consumers want to buy. It reminds me of who helped me breed my bulldogs, and we partnered on a dog. He's the best bulldog breeder ever, I think, in the history of the country when it comes to Westminster. He's won the bulldog section of Westminster 11 times. The closest second place person is three. And I asked him, I said, what's the key to you being so dominant when it comes to breeding bulldogs? And he said, you know, the secret is I don't fall in love with my breed. He said, you see that lady over there? I've bred with her. See that guy over there? I've bred with him. I don't fall in love with one of my dogs and only breed them. I'll breed with anybody. I just want to have the best dogs. And I think that's the key and the secret to success when it comes to merchandising or creating things that customers want to buy is don't fall in love with your breed or your favorite thing. But what is it they want?

The answer to that is always yes. Yes, yes. Because there may be items in the kitchen that chef has to get rid of. There may be items in the kitchen that have thrown off chef's kind of. Kind of cost of sales, and he needs to adjust his numbers and like, ah, that's gonna Spoil in two days. I know it sounds weird, me saying spoilage in restaurants, but it happens. That's gonna spoil in two days. I can still make a fantastic meringue out of that tonight with all these great presentations. Presentations. I need to catch up some dollars here, so I'll put that on the menu for $27. Tonight, I'll have the sommelier get some incredible bottle of wine that a supplier donated that he can sell for $14 a glass. Tonight, I'll pair those two, and I'll get the whole team around, and we call it pre shift. During pre shift, we talk about those two items. I just talked about my top salesman in the room, my top servers, who usually make the most. Get the most time off, kind of have the word with the restaura, do the best. They have their ways and their words of selling those wines. And guess what? I say all I need you to sell is 15 tonight. My top three. One, two, three. They're gonna sell five each. We're happy.

But what do they get for doing that?

Oh, it could be a $250 gift card. It could be a $75 gift card. It could be. It's always something. It could be. Oh, you win. If you. If you can sell these 15 items for me tonight, you'll get a new iPad. But the only reason you'll get a new iPad is because at some point, a supplier donated that iPad for something that was already done.

So I talk about it in my book, gamification. But it's no surprise that the restaurant industry uses gamification to highlight certain items that they want the waiters to sell that have a higher margin or that they need to move because of spoilage. And it works. The waiters will showcase those items, they'll sell more of them, and then they spiff them or play games with them in order for them to do that. And so, like magic, gamification works in any industry.