A Specialized Label Can Lead
To More Comfort and Cash

Few people think of elegant bottles of wine as interactive, portable billboards, but when restaurants, club and bars personalize their wines with custom labels, that’s exactly what they achieve.
    Sean Saylor, owner of Saylor’s Landing in Sausalito, Calif., says his restaurant and bar team tried for several years to develop a custom-label wine program. But Saylor’s had to go through a couple wineries before finding one that consistently delivered high quality wines and professional quality labels.
    “We finally found a winery based in California that bottles Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon for us,” Saylor says. “It’s more of a novelty thing for us to have our own wine, and it impresses the customers. I give them out myself for marketing and merchandising.”
    Saylor buys the wines wholesale for $7 a bottle and sells them for $27 per bottle.
“It’s the standard markup,” he says. “Take the bottle price times four, because you can get four glasses out of it, and I deduct a dollar from that so that it is cheaper to buy it by the bottle.”

Talk of the Bay
    At Scoma’s, a popular seafood restaurant and bar in San Francisco, Purchasing Director Kelly Bennett says custom-label wine business also evolved over time and through trial and error.
    “Many years ago, we had custom-label wines, but our wine program wasn’t so great back then, so they really weren’t popular,” Bennett says. “They were just something to have our name on, and back then people weren’t very quality conscious as far as wines went. So, we had kind of just gotten away from that.”
    Scoma’s currently offers three private-label wines.
    “There’s been a little bit of a learning curve on all of this, trying to do graphic design and produce a label, but the company has been very helpful,” Bennett says, adding that  having the venue’s name on a bottle of wine can make less adventurous customers more comfortable in ordering wines. NCB