How many wines should I offer by the glass?
Most high-check steakhouses should run six to eight BTG lines - not fifteen. Each slot needs enough velocity to finish an opened bottle within 24–36 hours, or you pay in oxidation and server confusion. Breadth is a bottle-list job; BTG is for movers and tonight’s pushes.
Velocity vs. breadth
Breadth helps guests explore on a bottle list. BTG is inventory with a clock attached. A useful planning question: how many glasses per slot per night?
- Core mover: 8+ glasses/night → safe BTG anchor (cab, popular white, bubbles if you push them).
- Supporting line: 3–7 glasses/night → viable with disciplined pours and same-day rotation.
- Trial / romance line: 1–2 glasses/night → belongs on bottles, not BTG, unless you have preservation that extends life past 48 hours.
Example: 200 covers on a Friday, 35% wine attach, 60% of wine orders on BTG → 42 BTG glasses total. Eight slots ≈ 5.3 glasses each - workable. Fourteen slots ≈ 3.0 each - half your list is a spoilage bet.
Rotation rules that hold
Operators who run lean lists still rotate seasonally. A simple cadence:
- Two permanent anchors (steak red + versatile white) - never swap without 2 weeks’ notice to the floor.
- Two quarterly rotates tied to menu LTOs or vendor features.
- Two “tonight” pushes changed weekly in pre-shift - same SKU, new pitch angle.
- One wildcard (rosé in summer, big red in holidays) only if velocity proves out in four weekends.
That’s six core + one conditional = 6–7 lines, not twelve.
Preservation economics
Without coravin-level tooling on every slot, assume a opened bottle loses quality after one service day for most wines by the glass. Cost math:
Wholesale $20 bottle, four 6 oz pours planned. If you sell two glasses and dump half a bottle nightly, true cost per pour = $20 ÷ 2 = $10 - not $5. At a $24 glass price, pour cost jumps from 25% to 42%. One slow slot can erase margin on two fast slots.
Preservation systems (vacuum, inert gas, single-serve kegs) change the breakeven - but they carry capital and maintenance cost. Only expand BTG count when preservation cost per slot < expected gross profit on incremental glasses. Rough check: if adding a ninth line yields fewer than four extra glasses per week, the slot isn’t paying for itself.
Lean lists in 2026
Three pressures push steakhouses narrower on BTG:
- Floor bandwidth: servers can pitch two pushes credibly; they cannot steward fourteen partial bottles.
- Guest behavior: high-check diners increasingly start with one glass or split two - not a full bottle on first order.
- Inventory discipline: distributors tighten allocations; dead BTG SKUs tie up cash better spent on bottle depth.
Put discovery on the bottle list and tech-sheet stories at the table via tools that know your inventory - not on a BTG scroll that reads like a wine shop.
What this means for your program
Audit last month’s BTG depletions: rank slots by glasses sold. Anything under three glasses per average service day gets rotated off or moved to bottle-only. Cap the active list at eight until every slot clears the 24–36 hour bottle-finish rule. Your servers will sell more when they repeat two names all night instead of apologizing for a list nobody can remember.