Storytelling on the Wine List: Three Sentences That Sell More By-the-Glass

"Nebbiolo. Piedmont. 2019. $22." That's a price tag. It is not a wine description. If your by-the-glass program is underperforming and your markup is in line with the market, the problem is almost certainly on the page. Specifically, on the line where the wine is described, which is in most cases a line that says nothing at all.

Why by-the-glass programs underperform

By-the-glass is the highest-margin part of most wine programs and the part guests interact with most. It's also the part where the writing is usually the weakest, because it gets treated as a product code rather than a sales pitch. A guest reading a BTG list is in the middle of a decision. They're hungry, they're talking to someone, the server is on the way back. The window in which a wine description can earn the order is approximately seven seconds. In those seven seconds, three things have to happen:

• The guest has to feel something specific about the wine.

• The guest has to trust that the wine fits the moment.

• The guest has to be able to pronounce the order out loud.

A region and a vintage do none of these.

The three-sentence method

The format that works consistently across price points is the three-sentence wine note:

Sentence one: what it tastes like. Specific words. "Crunchy red fruit, like sour cherry with the pit." "Salty, mineral, slightly chalky." "Round, ripe, a little bit chewy." Not "complex." Not "elegant." Those words tell the guest nothing.

Sentence two: what it goes with, or how you'd drink it. "With anything off the wood fire." "On its own, slightly chilled, before dinner." "With the duck if you're being serious about the duck." The pairing sentence does double work: it makes the wine feel useful, and it creates an implicit recommendation about the food.

Sentence three: a hook. One specific detail about the producer, the place, or the vintage that the guest can repeat at the table. "The vineyard is 800 meters up, which is why the acidity is what it is." "From a family that's been farming the same hill since 1830." "The 2022 vintage was the hottest on record and the winemaker leans into it." The hook is what makes the wine memorable. Memorability is what makes it ordered again.

That's the whole format. Three sentences. Forty to sixty words per wine. Less is fine. More is almost always worse.

What to cut (almost everything)

The sommelier note that doesn't work is usually long, dense, and full of words that are technically correct and emotionally meaningless. "On the nose, dark cherry and tobacco leaf, with hints of forest floor and a touch of leather, leading to a palate of integrated tannins and a long, lingering finish."

That paragraph has appeared, in some form, on every wine list in America. It has never sold a glass of wine to anyone who didn't already know they wanted it.

Things to cut:

• Tasting note jargon that requires a tasting glass and twenty years of context to parse. "Integrated tannins" means nothing to a guest. "Smooth" does.

• Adjectives that apply to every wine on earth. "Complex," "elegant," "balanced," "well-structured." If a description could be moved from one wine to another without anyone noticing, it's not a description.

• Region-first openings. "From the Côtes du Rhône..." starts the description with a place the guest may not recognize. Start with the taste. Place comes later.

Examples that work

A few sample BTG notes, in the three-sentence format. None of these are real wines on a real list; they're a format demonstration.

*Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast, 2022 — $16*

Light, juicy, like a raspberry kept in the fridge. Easy with anything off the wood-fired side of the menu, or just on its own. From a 14-acre plot that the winemaker farms personally; the 2022 is the freshest vintage we've had.

*Falanghina, Campania, 2023 — $14*

Salty and a little waxy, the way a good white from the Italian coast should be. Pour it with anything coming out of the fryer. Pronounced "fa-lan-GEE-na" — the grape was almost extinct in the 1990s and is having a quiet revival.

*Cabernet Franc, Loire Valley, 2021 — $18*

Crunchy red fruit, green pepper, slightly herbal — it's a thinking-person's red. Works with the steak; works even better with the duck. The vintage was warm enough to ripen everything without losing the lift. You'll notice these don't sound like wine list copy. That's the point. They sound like a friend describing a wine, which is what guests are looking for when they're reading a wine list at 7:45 PM on a Tuesday.

How to write these without hating your job

Sommeliers are busy people, and the prospect of writing forty-word notes for twenty BTG slots, plus a rotation, plus the bottle list, is the reason most lists default to region-and-vintage shorthand. Two practical fixes:

First, write the notes once and reuse them. A producer profile, written well, supports every vintage of every wine that the producer makes. You're not rewriting from scratch each quarter; you're updating a vintage line and maybe the pairing.

Second, treat the notes as living content. A digital wine list lets you update a tasting note the moment your understanding of a wine changes. The September pour of the Falanghina tasted different after two months of bottle age — the note can reflect that, today, not next quarter.

Where ShareVino fits

ShareVino's digital wine menu was built to support exactly this kind of writing — short, specific notes per wine, photos, the option to update in real time as the program rotates. Restaurants on the platform set up their BTG program first, write the notes in the three-sentence format, and watch the per-cover wine spend move. If you want help thinking through what your current list would look like in this format, we'll workshop a sample on a demo call.

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