Your wine sales are flat. Your cellar is full. The reason is not what you think.

In a year of 2,900+ UK hospitality insolvencies, "wait and see" is not a strategy

The numbers no one wants to look at.

In 2025, more than 2,900 UK hospitality venues filed for insolvency. The highest number since 2011. Roughly +30% versus 2024. Between January and September alone, 872 insolvencies, that is +26% year on year. Data: KOF Institute and GastroSuisse joint Branchenbarometer; MarketScreener Schweiz, October 2025; Watson, October 2025.

Look at the names you saw in the press. Restaurant Strauss in Manchester, 15 Michelin points. Paradies in Birmingham, 15 GM points. Z am Park in London. Maiengrün in Hägglingen. None of them were doing badly six months before they closed.

Each of them ran a beverage program, but with a leak nobody noticed before it was too late.

In the same survey, only 20% of UK operators rate their current business situation as "good."

23% rate it as "bad." 57% sit in "satisfactory", which is the polite UK word for "we are still open and we are watching every cover." Average revenue declined 2.6% for four consecutive quarters.

That is the macro frame. Now let's look at the wine problem.

By-the-glass (BTG) should account for 60-70% of wine revenue in a typical wine-led venue. Those are industry benchmarks, not aspirational targets. (Wine With Seth, BusinessDojo restaurant industry data.)

If only 3 or 4 every 10 customers buy a glass of wine, if your beverage gross profit margin is 50-60% instead of 70-80%, that is not an off quarter. That is a structural gap.

And every additional month you operate inside it, the gap compounds against the same macro pressure you already saw in the figures above.

If your high margin bottles are sitting on the shelves, gathering dust, the wine list is the problem.

You already know the symptoms: covers are steady, wine sales are not. Mid-tier and premium bottles, that would earn you a profit, sit in the cellar like collecting dust, that is just your money that you cannot touch.

Guests increasingly default to tap water, a Coca-Cola Zero, a matcha. You have tried discounting the by-the-glass selection, you have tried a wine night, you have asked the supplier for new bottles. The sales have not moved.

That is not bad luck. That is a leak.

A leak that compounds every month you keep running the same list, in a year when UK hospitality insolvencies ran past 2,900 filings, not a market that waits politely while the list stays unchanged.

The market is not going to wait for you to figure this out. The cellar will not pour itself. And every quarter you stay on the same list, the math gets worse, not because you are doing more wrong, but because the leak was always there and you only saw the symptom.

The wine list you are running was not designed by you. And the people who designed it were paid by someone else.

Stop for a second and ask yourself an uncomfortable question.

Who actually built your current wine list?

If you are like most managers I work with, the answer is some version of: "The supplier rep helped me put it together. They came in, brought a tasting kit, suggested a few labels, and we went from there. It was free."

That sentence — "it was free" — is the most expensive sentence in your P&L, your results

Here is what nobody told you:

A wine supplier earns margin on what they ship to the venue. They earn nothing on what the venue then sells through. Their financial incentive is moving inventory off their shelves and into your cellar, not moving inventory off your wine list and into your guests' glasses.

Those are not the same goal. They are not even adjacent goals. They are opposite goals.

This is not a moral failure on the supplier's part. Their business model is simply to sell wine, it is their role.

They behave as any merchant should. The problem is that your wine list ended up positive for the supplier and negative for your beverage sales.

In the US, where it’s easier to end up in court, there was a same structural conflict of interest documented across F&B sectors at the highest visible scale.

The New York Law Journal called it "Vendor Rebates: Franchising's Dirty Little Secret" in a December 2019 piece. Subway booked USD 116 million in vendor rebates in 2019 alone — nearly double the previous year — primarily from a single beverage supplier; franchisee disputes followed because the franchisees realised those rebates were funded by paying higher prices on the inputs they had no choice but to buy. Tim Hortons franchise owners argued the same shape of thing in their own court documents. Eater and Restaurant Business Online have catalogued the pattern repeating across F&B segments. (Law.com / NY Law Journal Dec 2019; Restaurant Business Online; Eater June 2019.)

The UK situation is quieter. Nobody is suing anybody. But the mechanism is identical:

1. The supplier sets up the list.
2. The list is skewed toward the supplier's portfolio margins.
3. The F&B manager inherits a list that looks free but is paid for, every month, in beverage gross profit that never shows up in the sales.

You did not see this as the cause because nobody framed it as a cause. It was framed as a favour.

Here is the chain you are running on, whether you saw it or not:

The cause is not that people don't drink. These people you cannot convince them to drink wine.

The problem is that your wine loving guests find a wine list that is confusing and not made to make your best wine shine.

The supplier did exactly what suppliers do. The fault is not theirs and it is not yours. The fault is that nobody named the cause, so for years the only "solutions" anyone sold you were patches on the symptom.

You didn't fail. You were looking at the wrong problem.

Look back at every "fix" you have run on this problem in the last 24 months. I will list the ones I hear most often from UK operators on a Checkup call:

• "I'll push wine harder. Train the staff to recommend more bottles." — The staff are downstream of the list. They are not selling badly because they are lazy; they are selling badly because the list does not give them anything to recommend with confidence.
• "I'll discount the by-the-glass selection." — A discounted wrong-wine sells the same as a full-priced wrong-wine. Discounting subtracts margin without solving the structural problem.
• "I'll have a wine event. Bring in a producer." — One good evening of revenue. The list goes back to running on Tuesday morning.
• "I'll ask my supplier for new bottles." — Same supplier, same incentive. New bottles, same list logic.
• "I'll hire a sommelier." — A sommelier lives in pairing artistry and cellar depth. Both are real skills. Neither of them rebuilds the list as a financial instrument with engineered pricing per glass and emotional design that moves the average order higher up the list. (And in United Kingdom in 2026, with manager turnover running 38-55% across the sector, very few bistros can absorb the salary anyway.)

Every one of these moves operates on a symptom of a poorly built wine list. You were looking at the symptom, not the cause. The leak starts much earlier.

You did not fail. You were given the wrong frame for the problem. Inside the wrong frame, every move you made was rational. It just was not going to work.

There is exactly one place to fix this. Upstream. At the list itself. By somebody whose financial incentive is your beverage gross profit and not their inventory rotation, not their pairing reputation, not the size of your subscription.

If you are curious about what I do, here is my story.

Marco Azzari — wine expert that is tired of poorly made wine lists that don't make customers happy

My Story

I am Italian. I have lived in United Kingdom for the last 8 years. I have worked in gastronomy since 2014 and inside the wine area for the last 8 years specifically. I trained in Food and Beverage Management and Food Engineering, here in United Kingdom — financial discipline applied to hospitality, not sommelier credentials. (I respect the sommelier path; I just did not take it.)

I am ranked in the top 30 Vivino users in United Kingdom — verifiable on the Vivino public ranking.

You will see me regularly at UK Wine events mainly London, and Ticino. Where UK wine operators talk to each other about what is actually happening on the floor.

The reason I built Wine CFO is simple. Five years ago I was building a wine list from scratch for a pizzeria in London. I felt the fear — too high and the prices won't sell, too low and there is no profit — while supplier reps breathed down my neck with bottles they needed to move. I watched a venue end up with 1,700 bottles in the cellar, GBP 100,000 of capital tied up, and a separate warehouse rented because the wine did not fit on-site.

That moment was when I understood the supplier-built list was the cause, not the cure.

So I took everything I had learned from F&B Management training, from Food Engineering, from the best F&B directors and sommeliers I had access to internationally, and I built the method I call: Wine Profit Engineering.

Others serve the wine. I architect the environment where your best bottles become legends.