New York City College of Technology
HMGT 2402
Professor Dagorn
Luis Merlin
03/24/2020

Wine List Comparison

Wine is the fabrication of fermented grape juice which plays an enormous role in the hospitality industry since beverage cost is higher than that of food cost. Whenever you visit a restaurant, you’re always greeting and seated with the wine list. Since I’m underage, they approach by asking how old I am and quickly take the wine list away. Depending on the restaurant you go to, their wine list could be either short or long. A thing that I have learned about being in the business is that wines aren’t just to drink rather a beverage to accompany your dish. Two restaurants wine list in which I thoroughly observed would be Del Posto which is a fine dining restaurant and Lupa Osteria Romana which is a casual restaurant. Both these restaurants are under the ownership of the Bastianich family, which mainly focuses on true authentic Italian cuisine.
I’ll first talk about Del Posto since I dined here for my dining room project. The minute you are seated they quickly approach you with the wine list menu; you’d be surprised how they show you their list of wines. On a tablet that’d be! Del Posto has a large variety of wines, with more than 235 pages full of wine from all over Italy. In Del Posto’s table of contents, you are introduced with categories such as Wines by the Glass, Sparkling Wines or White Wines. As you observed the entirety of the list you acknowledge you won’t spend all day looking through it unless you’re a wine lover. In the wine list provided, it has regions of Italy and specific selections of the wine of that region. For instance, there are wines from Tuscany, Trentino, and Veneto. As well as that you can assume their wine cellar is huge since the item number next to the name of the wine goes from 10000 to 40000.
I’ll now talk about Lupa Osteria Romana since I work at this restaurant. Lupa is more of a Roman-style Italian based food. You would consider this restaurant to be rustic since their wine list when it’s given to you, is in this leathery booklet with clear plastic sleeves. Unlike Del Posto’s wine list, Lupa’s has a smaller variety of wine options with only 20 pages in their list. Just like Del Posto, they focus on all the regions in Italy. As you read along with the list you observe the item number next to each wine and you can assume that their wine cellar is huge. It is, I’d know since I pass by every time I go downstairs to get my chef coat. Unlike Del Posto, since Lupa is casual, its wines have more wines from a specific region. For instance, Lupa has 80 different wines from Tuscany.
Both these restaurants share Italy as their focus for wine since of course, they’re Italian restaurants. They both include non-alcohol beverages in their wine list and differentiate with the fact that instead of having the wine pairing on the menu like Lupa, Del Posto has it with their Wine list as an option. These restaurants also have wines from Bastianich since he’s the owner of these luxurious eateries.

All in all, for the most part, I’d say Del Posto is the place to go if you’re a wine lover and would want to try something new whereas in Lupa, you’d get the same but just limited varieties.

References

1. Del Posto Wine List: https://hub.binwise.com/print/winelist_pdf.aspxlistid=685&locationid=300
2. Lupa’s Wine List: https://luparestaurant.com/wpcontent/uploads/sites/33/2014/08/Lupa-Wine-List.pdf