Wine Training: Calm, Cool and Collected
Pizza Antica’s ongoing wine training allows its young servers to sell wine with confidence.
By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2007
 Pizza Antica’s wine-education program includes daily tastings, food and wine pairings, and research presentations.
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Cozying up at a table at the Mill Valley, Calif., Pizza Antica, a couple wonders which wine pairs best with the grilled radicchio, goat cheese, pancetta and pesto pizza. Their young server Michelle Leo easily directs them to the Joseph Grosch Cabinet Reisling, 2005, a wine she says "has a really nice acidity and sweetness, and grilled radicchio tends to be a little bitter." The couple orders a bottle, and Leo trots off to get it. No typical head-scratching awkwardness. No hastily memorized prescripted spiel. And no $50 per-person check at the end of the meal.
This scene is the norm at four-unit Pizza Antica. Youthful servers—even those too young to legally drink wine—are still able to knowledgeably sell it, thanks to the casual-dining chain’s ongoing wine-education program, which includes daily tastings, food and wine pairings, and research presentations. As a result, wine accounts for 20 percent of food and beverage sales, and 40 percent of wine sales are bottled wine—vs. the 1 percent norm at other pizza restaurants around the country, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
"Why shouldn’t it be that way?" asks Tim Stannard, founding partner of San Francisco-based Pizza Antica and its parent Bacchus Management Group. "When I launched this chain, I did it because I was frustrated with the idea that you couldn’t have a great four-star dining experience in an inexpensive neighborhood restaurant. I wanted this to be the sort of place I’d go on a weekend."
Education Builds Confidence
Starting with the pizzas as the centerpiece, Stannard set out to create a concept that featured local, seasonal ingredients, excellent service and an international wine list. Pizza Antica’s service and menu came together, but the wine program posed a bigger challenge. "With Pizza Antica, our staff is younger, many still in school, the majority never even having opened a bottle of wine," Stannard says.
The answer? The company invests $250,000 a year in its wine-training program.
"Education builds confidence," explains Andrew Green, beverage director and partner at Pizza Antica. "And with a successful wine program, it all comes down to confidence. The guest needs to have a lot of confidence in the waiter, and the waiter needs to be confident in his or her knowledge of wine."
Learning Something New Every Day
Teaching staff about wine is an ever-deepening process at Pizza Antica. Forty-five-minute preshift meetings include 15-minute wine tastings. Every week, the meetings focus on one red and one white wine from Pizza Antica’s list of 80 wines, plus one additional wine each day. The staff learns about the wines through deductive tastings, which help them to think critically about the components such as appearance, body, acidity and fruit type.
Each staff member maintains a wine journal to make personal tasting notes. With basic facts in place, Green says it’s important to help staff create their own spiel about each wine—nothing pretentious, but personal and to the point. "I go through the process of deductive reasoning with them, helping them to understand the wine and then to talk about it on their own terms," he says.
Staff is taught the same approach with wine and food pairing: Deconstruct a dish and wine down to key flavor components. Then match them to complement or sometimes contrast primary flavors.
Also part of the twice-daily meetings: Each staff member takes turns giving speeches about a wine-related topic he or she has researched. Topics align to each person’s interests and tastes. They can cover subjects such as a vineyard, wine region, winemaker, vintage or type of wine. Each presenter gets about a week to do the research, drawing from the six or more wine encyclopedias at each unit or from the large research library at Bacchus Management’s main office.
Once a person gives his or her speech, a new topic is assigned. A little bit of information tends to whet appetites for more. "Usually what happens is, somebody will start with a topic that interests them, say, burgundy wine, and they drill down deeper and deeper, with subsequent presentations, moving to red burgundy and then maybe a specific winemaker in burgundy," Green says.
The daily talks also help servers present information quickly and naturally. They are trained to explain the wines to customers in less than a minute and focus on flavors. "In the beginning, they have a habit of hesitating. We want to break them of that, so that their ease with each wine helps develop rapport with their customers," Green says. "We also have to work to keep them from geeking out and offering way too much information."
Above and Beyond
Beyond training at the restaurant, Bacchus Management foots the bill for accreditation from the Wine and Sprits Education Trust or the first level of the Court of Master Sommelier training. It pays for 80 percent of the cost when hourlies pass and 100 percent of the cost upfront for managers.
As a result, there are one or more wine directors at every Pizza Antica. And staff at all levels are ready and eager to share the love. While one-third to half of customers usually drink wine they are familiar with, Green says staff steers guests toward something new. Pizza Antica does not offer a house white or red, for example. So when somebody asks for one, the server asks: What style? Crisp and fruity or rich and full-bodied? This opens guests to new options.
"So much ego and pretense is involved with wine in this country. It’s intimidated a lot of people, which is silly," Green says. "Wine is not rocket science."
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