iDrink
You know the fine-dining drill: The water’s served, the napkins are unfolded and then the waiter hands over the wine list — that unwieldy tome crawling with vineyard names, grape-growing regions and head-scratching phrases like “dusky hints of tobacco and burnt oak.”
That’s changing. Several fine dining restaurants in Las Vegas are going digital with the addition of iPads employing a system called SmartCellar. Developed by hospitality tech company Incentient, it aims to make choosing wine less intimidating for those of us who can’t remember whether we like pinot noir or petite sirah.
“In the traditional way, if you had dinner with four friends, someone gets elected to look through a bunch of pages of wine list, the sommelier comes over and you say, ‘I’ll have bin 454’ because you can’t pronounce the name of the wine, and that’s the end of that,” says Incentient CEO Pat Martucci. “Our system allows patrons to search for wine by everything from varietal to country to tasting notes — and then they can narrow it down to find something truly to their liking.” The device is currently deployed in four Las Vegas restaurants, Andre’s (Monte Carlo), Alizé (Palms), Jaleo (Cosmopolitan) and CUT (Palazzo). SmartCellar’s entry into the Vegas market adds to the app’s presence in 14 countries.
Does this mean sommeliers are getting corkscrewed by new tech? Not necessarily. Patrick Trundle, beverage director of Alizé and Andre’s, sees the glass as half full. “This is as useful a tool for the sommelier as it is for the guest,” Trundle says. “The wine list we had was a big, intimidating, 45-page book of pretty small type with a thousand different labels. On the other hand, SmartCellar is fun. It makes you want to play with it and engages everyone in choosing the wine.” And that play has serious impact. Martucci says some of his restaurant clients see up to a 25 percent boost in gross wine sales after introducing SmartCellar. The only thing missing? An app that dispenses samples. — A.K.