BinWise in the News

Today we’re excited to announce a great new product for restaurants, retailers, and beverage distributors – BinWise EasyList. 

EasyList is an easy-to-use directory of beverage distributors and their product catalogs, powered by BinWise’s industry-leading beverage information database. Unlike other similar services, EasyList is free to use, whether you’re a BinWise customer or not. 

BinWise EasyList for Restaurants and Retailers

EasyList makes it incredibly easy for restaurants and retailers to search BinWise’s robust database of beverage distributors in your area and get detailed information on all the products they sell. Additionally, you can compare prices across distributors and learn more about how other buyers have priced and sold the same products. You’re guaranteed to get the best price and maximize your margins. 

Our customers couldn’t be more excited about this new offering. Roberto Longo, Beverage Director at Jardinier & Shun, for example, says, “To have an alternative like EasyList as a digital catalog that will integrate with BinWise, my current inventory management system, will be a significant step towards one less system needed to manage my beverage program.”  

In the coming weeks, you will be able to place orders to distributors directly through the EasyList platform.

BinWise EasyList for Beverage Distributors

In the coming weeks you will be able to use EasyList to digitize and publish your product catalog and make it easy for retailers and restaurants to discover your products and place orders directly to you. Market your business to thousands of qualified buyers and acquire new business.

We’re hard at work on EasyList and plan to continue to add many more features over the coming weeks and months. Until then, create your free account and let us know what you think! 

Master sommelier Jack Mason keeps in touch with his inventory – and his clientele – Thanks to BinWise

The journey to become a master Sommelier is the wine geek’s equivalent of completing the Olympic decathlon. Jack Mason knows the ordeal—last year, at just 27 years old, he was one of just seven people (of 63 candidates from the U.S. and Canada) to pass the final exam and receive the coveted MS title.

It was a six year journey for the young somm, who has a passion for food and wine that led him from a high-school restaurant job to the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, then to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration and finally to the Court of Master Sommeliers and its infamously difficult exam.

Along the way, Mason had stints as a sommelier at Pappas Bros. Steakhouse in Houston with its Grand Award–winning list and at Altamarea Group in New York City, where he became a somm at flagship restaurant Marea. It was there that Mason first encountered BinWise, the beverage management system co-founded by former sommelier Tony Cha—a system that is revolutionizing the behind-the-scenes and sometimes less-thanglamorous world of being a workaday somm (Mason calls it “the part no one sees”).

Mason is now Wine Director at Marta, the pizza-centric Italian restaurant from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, which he helped open in September of 2014. It was a given that BinWise would be the system of choice at Marta—almost all of the other restaurants in Danny Meyer empire were already using it. “It was something I was excited about having for the Marta wine program,” says the Master Sommelier. “It’s super user-friendly . . . It’s very intuitive and easy to use, and it doesn’t take long at all to learn.”

What Mason appreciates about BinWise is its versatility in a real-world restaurant situation. “I enjoy getting a really accurate and quick view of where we’re at with inventory,” he says. “It helps with purchasing, and with forecasting how to purchase for the rest of the month.” Mason finds that BinWise provides a useful “snapshot of sale performance and theoretical cost percentage,” noting that BinWise also helps him understand whether an item is priced correctly and discover whether staff is over-pouring wines by the glass. Remote access and the ability to see inventory levels outside of the restaurant is another plus for Mason.

One surprising feature of the Marta wine program is that a quarter of Mason’s 250 selections are Champagnes. “This was something I wanted to champion,” says the Master Somm, but first he had to convince Danny Meyer, who was a little skeptical about French bubbly with Marta’s thin-crust, Roman-style pizzas. In the end, Mason prevailed: “I’m passionate about Champagne, and I also think it does go really well with pizza.”

Aside from Champagne, the wine list is all-Italian, as is sister restaurant Maialino. “We have the big boys—Piemonte and Tuscany,” says Mason, “but I like to focus on some higher-altitude stuff, such as Alto Piemonte and Valtellina. Of course, Sicilian wines are amazing and go great with pizza.”

Mason’s inventive wine program—supported by BinWise—is one of the reasons Marta has developed a following among other somms, who frequent the place on their evenings off. “One of my goals in getting to be a wine director,” says the MS, “was to be in a place where my friends can come and hang out, where other somms want to come and have a drink. Part of that was making things affordable and accessible. Thankfully, my goal has come to fruition.”

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by David Gadd / photo by Timothy Murray

Inventory management system BinWise makes life easier for master Sommelier June Rodil

Talk about having your hands full.  June Rodil not only passed the grueling exam for her Master Sommelier certification in May, gives lectures on the business of wine and beverages, and visited Champagne Roederer for our cover story in September (see page 44), but she is also Beverage Director for bustling Austin, TX restaurant group McGuire Moorman Hospitality.  The company currently operates six restaurants: flagship fine-dining establishment Jeffrey’s and its casual next-door spinoff, Josephine House; downtown Texas-style barbecue spot Lamberts; Perla’s Seafood & Oyster Bar and its rawbar-driven .little brother,. Clark’s; and Elizabeth Street Café, a neighborhood Vietnamese café/French bakery.

“They’re all in Austin, but they are all entirely different concepts, with entirely different wine lists and cocktail programs,” explains Rodil, who is charged with overseeing the wines, spirits, beers, non-alcoholic beverages, glassware and “all things liquid” for all six busy locations.  Almost impossible, you might be thinking. But thanks to inventory management system BinWise, which Rodil began using in January of 2015, her job got a lot easier.

She waxes rhapsodic about how BinWise has helped her streamline her inventory control, sales, purchasing and accountability. “You can maneuver it in many ways,” enthuses Rodil, who was introduced to BinWise directly by its co-founder, Tony Cha, himself a former sommelier.

“Each restaurant has its own BinWise account and does its own inventory,” says Rodil, “but I can keep track of company-wide data, sales and inventory online, from any location.” Rodil notes that even while she was getting hands-on lessons in remuage from Roederer’s Chef de Cave in Reims, she could still have her finger on the pulse of her restaurants’ beverage programs digitally, thanks to BinWise.

Her favorite feature of BinWise?  “The variance report. It tells you how accurate your sales-to-purchase ratios are—it helps with accountability,” says Rodil. This feature, which compares sales against purchases and inventory, notes any discrepancies; it is especially good for by-the-glass programs, which are highly important in several of the casual restaurants Rodil oversees. “If you have bartenders with ‘heavy hands,’ it brings that to your attention,” says the Master Sommelier; “or it might tell you that they haven’t been pouring enough. It’s great when you’re trying to be accurate about your costs and ensures consistency for what guests received in their glasses.”

Rodil notes one specific example of how using the application helped her bottom line: “BinWise told us that sparkling rosé by the glass is our highest-volume and -profit item company-wide” Rodil says, “so we are considering making a private label sparkling rosé to enhance the bottom line while bringing a cool and dynamic new branding project to the fold.  When you realize that you’re looking at things that you haven’t been able to see previously, it’s awesome!”

Rodil, with the help of Assistant Beverage Director Daisy Ryan, helped management and staff at all the McGuire Moorman restaurants implement BinWise.  “It takes time to establish a new system, but in the end it will save a lot of time,” she comments. “Our beverage managers used to come in on their days off to place orders; now they can do so remotely by looking at their perpetual inventory on any given day” She also notes that BinWise’s third-party email system forwards distributor orders seamlessly and transparently, “as if you were personally ordering the product.”

The irony is not lost on Rodil that the further along somms progress in their beverage careers, the more they have to be adept in accounting, costing and other tedious business techniques—things that may distance them from the passion that got them into the industry in the first place. “I love what I do and what got me into this job—the mystique, the poetry of wine—but my job can only exist within specific business parameters, so you’ve got to be able to run numbers and know what those numbers mean. If you have a program that makes that easier, you have more time to be in love with your work.”

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by David Gadd / photo by Kirk Weddle

TONY CHA, CO-FOUNDER OF BINWISE, HAS WORKED IN RESTAURANTS NEARLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE.

In his youth, most of his free time was spent working in the restaurants that his parents owned in New York City. When it came time to decide on college, he attended Penn State and majored in hotel and restaurant management. Cha ended up in San Francisco where his professional experience spans nearly 15 years managing beverage programs for places like Slanted Door, Rubicon and Michael Mina. On a recent unusually bright mid-August afternoon, over Aperol Spritzes, Cha spoke to The SOMM Journal about how his experience managing beverage programs led to the necessity for a platform like BinWise.

The Somm Journal First Press

“Managing beverage programs in the old-school fashion, which is still the norm,” Cha explained, “was very challenging. You are managing multiple spread sheets and Word documents that are static, so there’s no data communication between them, which creates plenty of room for human error. That makes it really difficult to have transparency and to know exactly what is happening in your beverage program.”

While working as Head Sommelier at Michael Mina, Cha met Grant Gilligan, the restaurant’s Cellar Master. Gilligan, a part-time developer as well, empathized with Cha’s frustration with the administrative and logistical aspects of running the wine program. Ultimately, he began to write code to explore ways to integrate manual spreadsheets and Word documents on to a cloud-based web platform. They began showing the product to colleagues and solicited their feedback. Soon after, Gilligan founded BinWise. The platform began to pay off immediately; Cha found that the actionable real-time data could help him easily lower costs and increase revenue.

TODAY, BINWISE IS THE ULTIMATE ONE-STOP SHOP—a cloud-based beverage management platform that connects buyers directly to their distributors and streamlines every aspect of running a beverage program, from ordering, receiving, inventory and sales, to on-demand analytics and reporting. BinWise was created by industry veterans, so it is no surprise that it is intuitive. “From the very beginning we were focused on solving the most common problems facing beverage directors, sommeliers and owners and our DNA has not changed,” says President and CEO Isabelle Hong. “We listen to our customers and are continuously evolving. In fact some of our best product features have come from real users providing suggestions and ideas for improvement.”

Daniel Grajewski, Director of Beverage at Mina Group, says, “With just a click, BinWise’s enterprise feature has done a great job of consolidating all the information I need.” Grajewski says that BinWise has created an organized system for smart purchasing, which allows his staff to be more focused on guest experiences and be on the floor rather than being bogged down with administrative tasks.

“We sync with our clients’ POS [point-of-sale] systems,” explained Cha, “so every night, every item that is sold is depleted from inventory.” The biggest ROI comes from BinWise’s ability to deplete products by portion. You can determine your glass pour size to the ounce and every time a sale is made, BinWise depletes that amount from inventory. “We also provide on-demand analytics by product so you can manage your overall cost percentage of your BTG program by managing your product mix.” says Cha.

Sommeliers are the tip of the spear for BinWise and some of our biggest supporters.” — BinWise President and CEO Isabelle Hong

Mauro Cirilli, a 20-year industry veteran, is Beverage Director at Press Club, an expansive, upscale wine bar in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood. He first heard about BinWise by word of mouth from friends in the industry. “Before BinWise, I had to compile notes, prices, contacts, inventories and in so many different documents in my computer—inevitably there were little mistakes here and there that would have an impact on my bottom line,” admits Cirilli. “With BinWise it’s no longer like that—all my information is organized and easy to reach, keeping me in control of my perpetual inventory on a daily basis and saving me time to better focus on my job.”

Tara Patrick is Lead Sommelier at San Francisco’s two star Michelin and haute cuisine favorite Quince, as well as at Cotogna, a more casual establishment offering rustic Italian cuisine. Patrick manages both restaurants program out of one 4,000-bottle wine cellar and says, “BinWise’s corked bottle feature has made my job a lot easier.”

“Corked bottles appear more often than you might think and trying to follow up with your sales rep on one bottle here and there becomes a bit of nightmare.” says Patrick. With BinWise, that’s no longer an issue. Corked bottles are flagged as “corked” and the system then does the work of following up, by alerting the appropriate sales representative and sending notifications on behalf of the beverage director, so that time and energy can be spent focusing on other things. In Patrick’s case, another benefit is the ability to maintain a constant snapshot of which bottles in her cellar belong to Quince and which belong to Cotogna. Before BinWise, it was a challenge, but now it has become as easy as checking a bar code on a bottle.

According to Hong, “BinWise exists to transform the beverage industry and we are relentlessly focused on bringing value to our customers.” As part of the bundle of services, BinWise also offers staff training and technical support. While BinWise relies on internal expertise from its sommelier co-founder, it is feedback from their customers that allows them to continuously improve and offer best-in-class features for the industry.

Hong says “as industry leaders and influencers, sommeliers are the tip of the spear for BinWise and some of our biggest supporters. When you have customers with as complex programs as these using your platform, you know you’re doing something right.

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by Jonathan Cristaldi / photos by Hardy Wilson