How do Restaurant Owners Manage Wine?

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Chuck Byers from Expert Village. I'm with Jean-Jacques Quinsac one of the owners of le Select, and I'm telling you the select restaurant in Toronto. We have about 14,000 bottles in this cellar which is composed in two paths. One where the wine is sleeping, not on the wine list yet. And one spot where all the wine are for sale on the wine list. We've been, we started collecting wine in 1982 and on. We still have a lot of old guys in the cellar in some corner with a lot o dust. What do you do to select a sommelier when you need one? Sommelier, we have a couple of sommelier on staff, but we wanted to hire people with the wine knowledge. It was very, very important. First, what's the point of having all this wine if nobody can talk or help the customer decide which bottle to enjoy during their meal. The process of hiring sommeliers is easy, because we are offering such a beautiful wine list. They all come to me and are looking for a job, so it makes my life easier. We just have to pick the most charming one of them, the most knowledgeable. In your opinion, what's the most important thing a sommelier can do for his guests? To help them; to advise them. Most of the people are impressed by the number of wine we have on this list. It is about a thousand labels, and it takes three days to read the work. We need help, and the sommelier is an important person to understand what they want to eat. From there they have to decide, with the customer, which country you want to go: new world or old world. What type range of price he wants to spend that night and help them with the food. We are trying to match food and wine as much as we can. It's so enjoyable and everybody should try that."