JASON DOYLE INTERVIEW IN NIGHTCLUB & BAR MAGAZINE

With wine bars of all shapes, sizes and types cropping up, one growing concept in the category focuses on offering something unique and special.

Jason C. Doyle (pictured below) is the founder and CEO of The Wine Loft wine bar (www.thewineloft.net), and his concept will have 18 locations open by the end of 2008. The first Wine Loft opened in New Orleans in 2003, and the company has commitments for more than 80 franchise locations in five countries. Additionally, six corporate-owned locations are in various stages of development.

NCB: What criteria are necessary to run a great wine bar?

Jason Doyle: The concept of a wine bar world can be broken down into three types. Number one, you have half-retail, half-tasting. These are concepts like The Grape. Then some places offer a bistro concept. It is a café concept, and they offer some wine. The third is a lounge concept. That is what we are. We offer an upscale atmosphere with heavy emphasis on wines by the glass.

We have 50 percent sales of our sales coming from wines by the glass. Another 15 to 20 percent of our sales come from bottles, 15 percent in food, 15 percent in spirits, and another 5 percent is beer sales.

Lots of people operating in the other categories don’t serve spirits. We do, because our target market is women, and women purchase cocktails a great deal of the time.

I feel that a good wine bar is marked by its wine-by-the glass selection. There should be selections from around the globe –– Chilean, South African, Italian ­­­­–– and then there should be an orbital selection in each varietal. You should be able to get a glass of Australian Chardonnay, California Chardonnay and then also a great French Chardonnay, for example.

NCB: Why do you think your Wine Loft concept in particular has become so successful?

JD: We spend a lot of time training our staff. We have an online training program we utilize called Bacchus University, and we train everyone through that program. Our wine component is called Wine Sage, and it is a partnership with the Wine Spectator School. Our servers, cooks, bar staff, etc., can individually self-promote by going through all the schools Wine Spectator offers, and we also offer it through Certified Specialists of Wine.

Essentially, what this means is, a server can come on with us at The Wine Loft and in three to six months become a specialist on his or her own. We don’t have a lot of turnover, because of our intense training.

NCB: Tell us a little about how you approached the franchise process with your concept.

JD: Our first location opened in 2003 in Louisiana. We began franchising in 2005. During that time, we paid all the legal fees and trademark registration fees, so when we were ready we could just launch. We worked on our intellectual properties — all things a franchisee is looking for. And, we worked on our internal systems to become as profitable as we could.

We then signed leases in Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. We wanted to create a regional pipeline of inventory, so again, when we did launch, we would have that pipeline in place. All of that happened from the end of 2004 through June of 2005 … and we were in construction in Baton Rouge and in Birmingham at the same time when someone offered to buy the Baton Rouge location.

From there we sold the second one in Birmingham, and things have taken off. Looking at the long term domestically, we believe we have an inventory of 350 locations. We are also working on an international franchise program in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the coming years. They are emerging markets. Our goal is to take the infrastructure we developed here and duplicate it in those countries.

NCB: How do you stay on top of the latest trends in wine and wine service?

JD: We dine out and travel quite a bit. I think the best way is to physically be in the middle of it. I am in Las Vegas every quarter and in New York City almost every month. We have construction in Redondo Beach and the Northern Bay area of California. So we are in great food and wine towns regularly.

(On-premise) we have a company intranet we use. When you open it, every week there are new video blogs, articles and any techniques with respect to our business. For example, on there now is the 2007 Wine Blog Awards. Our franchisees know our intranet is a primary source for them to stay on top of trends in food and wine.

NCB: How are you dealing with the rising gas prices and the increased cost of shipping?

JD: They haven’t really hit us yet. We have been more affected by the weak dollar and heightened euro. Wines from the old world have gone up in cost, which means we have to price them higher on our menu. We also have to look harder and deeper for better wines at lower prices. South Africa, Argentina, Chile — those countries haven’t seen increases from a euro standpoint, so we look there too.

With shipping, most inventory has been in those markets prior to six months ago. My gut is that as we approach third quarter, we are going to see our costs go up. Distributors who have employees and trucks — those folks are going to be affecting us with incremental increases.

As for bringing people to our locations, we are a lifestyle brand. When people come in, they are coming for the experience. That puts pressure on our unit level operators to create that great experience, so we can compete with the other venues.

We sell social experience, so as long as we can continue to create that environment, we can beat out our competitors.

NCB: How often do you change your menu?

JD: We have the ability to print off menus every day in every venue. Local operators in our company may want to take advantage of a particular promotion a distributor is offering, and then they can print a new menu that day.

We take the same approach with food. We have 30 items. Six are consistent, and then the operators choose the rest. They have to carry at least 12.

NCB: Where do you see wine bar concepts like The Wine Loft headed in the coming five years?

JD: I think the space is going to be more competitive. Our business is one where people are always striving to carve out a niche. Our goal is to run efficiently as a franchise, but not to be perceived as a franchise.

When people come into our establishment, they come because they want to come to Wine Loft, not just a bar that has wine. We want to be sure that in our spaces customers have the experience they are seeking.

They are coming to us as a destination in mind, and that we capture them for two to three hours at a time is a must.

Make Your Crappy Wine Into Good Wine

The machine recreates the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules in the bottle





From the Daily Telegraph:

Inventor Casey Jones says the £350 gadget uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle.

The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like an ordinary ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker.

Mr Jones, 53, said: "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage tasting like it costs hundreds.

"It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt.

"The look and bouquet of the drink is improved and because of the chemical changes, the alcohol is easier to absorb by the kidneys and therefore, hangovers are virtually eliminated.

"I have even tried it with orange juice after I saw a similar device being used in the US. It didn't just make the juice taste fresher, it made it look brighter too."

He added: "I see thousands of inventions every year and there are a lot of crazy ones, but in every ton of coal there is a diamond.

"Of all the inventions I deal with, this one has amazed me the most in the effects it has on alcohol."

Andre Jones, no relation, a winemaker who produces 40,000 bottles-a-year at his family-owned Buzzard Valley Vineyard, near Tamworth, Staffs, said he was impressed by the gadget.

He said: "Casey took one of our bottles and brought it back for us to try after it had been in the machine. I was amazed, it had definitely aged.

"Obviously it can't change the grape variety used, but it does mean a relatively poor variety can be made to taste a lot higher market.

"I would like to see it used on some of the Mediterranean varieties like a Rioja or a Shiraz.

"This could definitely have some applications for those restaurants who are buying wine for £10,000 a case.

"Technically I suppose you could buy a good wine at two or three years old and age it so it tastes like a 20-year-old vintage.

"Wine is at it's best five or so years after it's made, so this could help homebrewers taste aged wine more easily."

However, he warned restaurants and bars against trying to pass off a cheaper bottle of wine as a more expensive one just because it had been through the machine.

"You would have to tell customers it wasn't quite the real thing," he said.

The Wine Loft Email News Blast Week of October 6th

French vintners fear worst sales since post 9/11


French wine merchants fear the growing world financial crisis could cause their worst end-of-year sales squeeze since the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.


Bordeaux-based wine merchant, Jeffrey Davies, said that while the crisis triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington had hit US wine sales, the economic meltdown had global implications. "The big spenders that were ordering the top wines in top restaurants have been taken out," Davies said. After the attacks, sales of Bordeaux wine to the United States fell by 29 percent in volume during the final quarter of 2001 -- the key Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year period, which accounts for half of annual sales. Sales within the European Union also dropped by 10 percent.

Davies now anticipates "a major impact" on export figures for the last three months of 2008, given the ongoing financial uncertainty, the US elections, and the fact that wine is far from an essential household requirement. Fabrice Bernard of Millesima, which with 55,000 clients in Europe is one of Bordeaux's biggest online and mail order wine merchants, said turnover in September this year was five percent lower than in September 2001. "This is the first time since we went into business in 1983 that we have witnessed such a slowing of orders," said Bernard. Bernard described German and British sales as frozen, while other European clients have significantly reduced purchases. "Even in the City of London we are starting to see certain wine shops tightening their belts after recent job losses," said Jean-Christophe Mau, another Bordeaux merchant and owner of Chateau Brown.

Mau, who saw a 20 percent drop in sales during the six months following 9/11, says he is waiting to see what the coming weeks will bring. His fear is that this time round, the crisis will be longer and deeper. But the upside of 2008, he said, is that all the eggs are no longer all in one basket. "Asia is a very profitable," he noted. Citing Asia as a solution to slowing demand from traditional markets has become a standard response in Bordeaux, but whether the region can make up for losses in America and Britain -- the two top importers by value -- is doubtful.

In 2007, a third of Bordeaux's total wine sales were exports, worth a total of 1.39 billion euros (1.9 billion dollars) to the industry. Of those exports, Britain and America account for more than 431 million euros, while the combined Asian value for countries including Japan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan come to only 286 million. The expected drop in exports will add to a slight drop in sales volumes for the first six months of 2008, due partly to the slow uptake of the 2006 and 2007 vintages, and partly to the euro's strength. The delivery of the much-vaunted 2005 "vintage of the century," boosting sales by 42.5 percent in value, saved Bordeaux in value terms in the first half of this year. But sales of the 2008 vintage, currently being harvested, are unlikely to do the same.

Early reports suggest this year's harvest is good quality, but problems include fewer grapes due to cooler, wet weather and higher costs after a long-running fight against mildew.

Hangovers

It’s not even January 1 and there’s an article about hangovers! Joan Acocella writes in the New Yorker about the phenomenon that Egyptians call “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight” and the Danes “carpenters in the forehead.”

While drinking to excess without a resulting hangover might sound like something technology should have fixed by now (I prefer a huge glass of water and 2 Tylenols before bed (my poor liver)) Acocella doesn’t suggest much in the way of a cures. But she does talk about various causes:

The severity of a hangover depends, of course, on how much you drank the night before, but that is not the only determinant…And what kind of alcohol did you drink? In general, darker drinks, such as red wine and whiskey, have higher levels of congeners—impurities produced by the fermentation process, or added to enhance flavor—than do light-colored drinks such as white wine, gin, and vodka. The greater the congener content, the uglier the morning.

Does that red-white difference ring true for you? I have to admit Vodka has been prety kind to me over the years...well at least with respect to the morning after. What about “natural” winemaking? Sake drinkers often tout its purity and some even go so far to say that it doesn’t give headaches. I’ve have nothing to add to that thought.

And as to the cure, she suggests wearing sunglasses and moping around. (Just kidding). Jay swears by the “hair of the dog.” But I’d steer clear of this morning-after twist from a Ukrainian in the story: “two shots of vodka, then a cigarette, then another shot of vodka.” She counsels to avoid Tylenol (uh oh, I'm not happy after 20 years of post drinking tylenols) since it increases toxicity to the liver. For prevention, she points to advocates of drinking lots of water, a glass of milk or eating a meal prior to drinking. And, of course, consuming alcohol in moderation. (that's just plain silly).

SOMETHING ABOUT WINE

New research suggests that the type of music one listens to while drinking wine can dramatically affect the taste.

Heriot Watt University psychology professor Adrian North tested 250 students and found that the taste changed by up to 60 percent depending on the vibe of the tune. In an earlier study, North determined that people were five times more inclined to purchase a French bottle instead of a German one if accordion music was being played. From the BBC News:

(In the latest study,) four types of music were played - Carmina Burana by Orff ("powerful and heavy"), Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky ("subtle and refined"), Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague ("zingy and refreshing") and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook ("mellow and soft")

The white wine was rated 40% more zingy and refreshing when that music was played, but only 26% more mellow and soft when music in that category was heard.

The red was altered 25% by mellow and fresh music, yet 60% by powerful and heavy music.

The results were put down to "cognitive priming theory", where the music sets up the brain to respond to the wine in a certain way.

WINE FOR CHARITY

Jose Reyes, Johan Santana and Brian Schneider have teamed up with Charity Wines to raise money for a variety of worthy causes, according to a press release from Clos LaChance Winery & Estate Vineyard located in San Martin, CA.

Reyes, Santana and Schneider join Curt Schilling, Manny Ramirez, Jorge Posada and Bobby Abreu, among other players, by lending their name and image to the bottle, creating CaberReyes (which will benefit the Major League Baseball Players Trust), Santana’s Select (benefiting The Johan Santana Foundation), and Schneider Schardonnay (benefiting The Catching for Kids Foundation).

Wines will be available in retail shops all across the Tri-State area starting mid-May and are expected to sell for $13.