Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/490558
{ SOMMjournal.com } 105 changed wine perceptions dramatically and in predictable ways. "I looked around the room that night and could see a shift in the staff's body language. Their new-found confi- dence really showed, and it hit me—it was because the sales skills in that single lesson had applied to all our wines, not just the six we tasted." Coaching Builds Wine Skills Eduardo Porto Carreiro is Head Sommelier of DBGB Kitchen + Bar, Daniel Boulud's popular brasserie in Manhattan's East Village. He goes to great lengths to develop exactly these kinds of wine skills in his new staff training program. "What I wanted to do was to instill the unpretentious confidence of experience," he says, "not the wonky talking-head effect you can get with pure rote memorization. For the conversation at the table to feel real, not stilted, we need to provide wine context too, not just wine information." Last spring, Porto Carreiro shifted from a lecture format to an interactive coaching model for wine trainings. "We provide an optional weekly one-hour session and change the approach each time. One week we'll taste wines blind, the next we'll explore pairing synergies by looking at how a dab of butter affects how a range of wines taste." Whether he is talking about the psychology behind effective sales language or demonstrating how wine's flavors shift with aging, his aim is to engage his audience and expose them to the kinds of experiences that helped him get a handle on how the wine world works. Eight months into his staff training experiment, the results are impressive. "The most obvious change visible in the sales reports is that the staff is selling far more bottles." In prior years bottles had accounted for an average of 48% of total wine sales. Recent months have shown marked increases, ranging from 54% to 57%, which helps explain an uptick in check average. "Often these are bottles I didn't think the waitstaff could sell without my help, like an 18-year-old Morgon. It makes me so proud." Don't Miss the Forest for the Trees In wine country, Scott Turnbull, Sommelier and Beverage Director at Calistoga's Solage, sounds a similar note. "We probably get more questions about the intracacies of wine- making from diners here in Napa Valley than anywhere in the U.S., both from locals and visitors," he says, so technical data still get lots of emphasis in his day to day training and weekly "Sunday school" sessions. "But even here, I want to provide my team with useful sales tools, not just dry sta- tistics. I need my servers to be comfortable reading their guests and gauging their needs, ready to provide the kind of narrative hook or pairing guidance that is most likely to close the sale. I always tell them that if someone asks about which side of Howell Mountain a Cabernet was grown on, or how many months a Chardonnay spent on the fine lees, I'm always happy to discuss such finer points. It's my responsibility to have the more esoteric details ready for service, not theirs." Eduardo Porto Carreiro, Head Sommelier of Daniel Boulud's DBGB Kitchen + Bar in Manhattan, prefers an interactive coaching model for staff wine trainings. Scott Turnbull, Sommelier and Beverage Director at Solage in Napa Valley, encourages his staff to go beyond "dry statistics" in wine service. PHOTO COURTESY OF SCOTT TURNBULL PHOTO: V. ROLLISON