Heights Chateau is a neighborhood store located at 123 Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn Heights. The store has a classic, simple design with options of carefully selected wines from around the world, as well as spirits. Customers have the option of choosing wines from a wide variety off the shelf or from the temperature-controlled cellar. Heights Chateau has been featured in many magazines and newsletters and is not only known for their huge variety of wines but for their wine tastings and food pairings.

Upon walking into the store, the employees were very welcoming and friendly. Wines were located neatly along the sides and the center of the store and the spirits were located to the back. While walking around I realized that different countries have a different way of organization. All the wines are neatly categorized by the country they are from. On the right side of the store, are foreign wines organized by different regions and the left side of the store, is organized with domestic wines from all around the USA organized by the different types of grape. Heights Chateau chooses their wines in three different ways: firstly, by a list of classic wines that are expected by customers, secondly, their own desire to explore new wines and thirdly, wines that are brought to them by their provider.  They also try to keep their products at a standard level temperature of 71° – 72° in store and the cellar is held at a temperature of 43° – 44°.

When introducing a new wine to customers not much marketing takes place there. They are not really interested in the idea of samples or tastings. Their key concept is just trying to have everything organized. In general, they try to place the more expensive wines at the top and the least expensive ones to the bottom so that way they would be able to make more space for the new ones. Due to their huge inventory they do a newsletter called “What’s New” that they send out every week just to inform customers of all the new wines but most times marketing their new products are done by word of mouth from employees to customers. It is essential that employees get familiarized and informed about the different wines that they offer.

Cremant is a sparkling wine made from pinot noir grapes in the traditional method.

Cremant is a sparkling wine made from pinot noir grapes in the traditional method.Cabernet Sauvignon from Jerusalem Vineyard is a dry red wine with aromas of field berries and vanilla.  It is also known as a Kosher table wine.

Retail Analysis Blog, By Veronika Lisetska

  Buying a bottle of wine that you would like could be a challenging job. Going to the right store where a person that knows enough about wine and would be able to help you is very important. As for my retail wine shop project I chosen  a store “Smith & Vine”  that is located  at 317 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231. They also have a webpage https://stinkybklyn.com/wines/#!/price_range=942

     This store is highly organized and has a big selection of different type of wine. It is easy to locate different countries wine like Italian, French, German and so on. Each wine label that this store has says where particular wine is from, region, vintage, grapes variety and tasting notes. Very often when you walk to the liquor store there is a lot of wines but it is hard to choose because sellers do not know enough about wines.       

     Expensive wine in this store are located behind a little cage and can be assessed by a seller. In the middle of the store there is an “ island “ that has the most popular or any new wines that the manager brings in. What I likes the most about this store is that the owner knows what he is doing. This store has different prices starting from around  ten dollars a bottle and goes up to two hundred dollars.

     This retail shop has nice design and friendly atmosphere in side.

-Label that explains Region, Grape variety and has some tasting notes.

-Sparkling wines that are not from France. -Those three wines are from Italy.

-“Shelf Talker” wine -It is from Italy

– Wine from Spain

Retail Analysis

G&I WIne and Spirits Retail Store
The G&I Wine and Spirits Store located in Brooklyn NY on 48 Willoughby Street. This retailer provides numerous opportunities to achieve large profit margins, while the operations also put forward specific challenges. Furthermore, apart from the additional requirements faced by the liquor store, the owners also ensure that they pay attention to the inventory control, security and loss prevention, and age verification precautions. Below are some of the attributes of the wine liquor store:
Full inventory control
Even though G&I wine and spirits wine store is relatively small, it carries thousands of the SKUs in a numerous variety of kinds. This ranges from the individual bottles to the cans to the multi-packs, kegs and much more. According to Boardman (2014), the Point of Sale for the liquor store with the inventory tracking is designed for the different ranges of the products which are aligned with the integrated barcode scanning of the different UPCs with the fast precision and efficiency.  This assures the wine liquor store of up-to-date knowledge of the current and where it is located, the selling points and the urgent orders.
Sales Reports and Analysis
Based on the G&I Wine and Spirits retail store is backed up with the complete and precise inventory control. The Point of Sale for the retail shop has a system with the data that is required to offer detailed and accurate reporting of the sale of products.  This is shaped into different datasets such as broken down into the specific day, month and year the products were sold. The system also singles out the high-profit generators and the seasonal favorites. The store can also track the individual employee’s sales and the fast conversion rates.
Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits
Purchase order generation
The Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits is located in Manhattan, NY and is complemented the solid inventory control for the production of the purchase orders as the wines run low. The store also incorporates the type of functionality which allows the operators to manage the controlled system of the alcohol distribution industry efficiently. The store creates, sends and tracks the purchase orders in line with the management of the receipts of the deliveries and the related payments.
Age verification
The Pure Liquid Merchants Wine Liquor Store entails the age verification unit through the swapping of the purchasers’ driver’s licenses. This facilitates the compliance to the existing liquor laws. This prevents selling liquor to the minors and related tobacco products. This includes identification of the information manually that is fed into the system to assure that the customers are of legal age. This is done by employee training. A major weakness is the lack of the age verification technology which makes the store liable to face fines in case of a sting operation.
Loss prevention and surveillance
The Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits store has state of the art security details to prevent loss in case of break-ins and defaulting customers. The store has an advanced system that overlays the video surveillance to different stations with the generation of text data on customer receipts. This allows the managers to link the malicious activities from the station location. It also prevents the cases of disloyal customers.

Below are some pictures for both stores:

This wine is from Pure Liquid and it is from Bekka Valley, Lebanon it is a 2014 white wine

This is one of the few ways Pure Liquid showoff their popular wines. This is what they consider their “shelf talkers”, Most are red wines,

This wine is sold in G&I Wines and Spirits store, a product of Spain

Another wine from Spain from Pure Liquid. Red wine from the area called Ribera Del Duero and it is a 2015 bottle of wine.

A sparkling wine from Italy called cupcake.

On September 27, 2018 I went to Astro Wine & Spirit store located in “De Vinne Press Building” (399 Lafayette St. (at East 4th St.) New York, NY 10003). I went to the wine store with two of my classmates, that is Ellie and Preeya. We arrived at the store early in the morning, as they were still setting up the store and restocking the products.

Continue reading →

I visited Our Wine & Spirit shop located on 40-40 College Point Blvd, Flushing, NY. I got an interview with Wincy who the manager of this shop is. She was very friendly and gladly answer any question I may have. The first question I asked her was “How did you start working in a liquor store?” she replied with “It was random.” The second question, “Do you have a wine certificate?” She said, “no, I feel that is pointless now, I know everything that there is need to know about wine.” Third question, “What happens if you get a case of wine that goes bad and a customer wants to come back and return it?” She said “I will return it and send it back to the supplier, tell them about the wine and from there we negotiate. “Lastly the Fourth question, “What is the most popular red wine that people want?” She said, “a Malbec from Argentina.”

When I first visited Our Wine & Spirit shop, my first expression was moderate, just another small liquor store. They had everything on display with a price tag on it. The drawback of this place was there was a lot of personal stuff from the employees laying in the center and they have a pet bird inside the shop so, the store looks messy and has a bad aroma because it seems that they don’t clean the bird’s cage very often. When I went and visited Astor Wines & Spirits located on 399 Lafayette St, New York, NY; I had my mind blown. Everything is so neat and organized. They have tastings and so many varieties of wines for people likings. But the small liquor store is for customers that go their regularly, they would buy alcohol according to the customers they get. Astor is a place for people who are new to buying alcohol and doesn’t know what kind to get.

Name of the store: Our Wine & Spirits

Locations: 4040 College Point Blvd, Flushing, NY, 11354

“Shelf Talker”:

• Basic Display of the store wines with a price tag showing

A Red Wine from Spain:

• Region: Castilla
•  Grape Variety: Cabernet Franc
• Vintage: 2016
• Producer: Hello World

A sparkling wine that is not French:

• Country: Italy
• Region: Siciliani
• Grape variety: Muscat
• Vintage: none
• Producer: Markovic Estates

A Red wine from an unknown region:

• Country: Peru
• Region: Chincha Valley
• Grape Variety: 75% Malbec, 25% Merlot
• Vintage: 2014
• Producer: Tabernero