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Michael Davis – Glass Act
d=”standfirst”>Michael Davis has nearly tripled wine sales at The Chancery Court Hotel with his £30,000 Cruvinet wine preservation system. Patrick Schmitt encounters man and machine in perfect harmony
The expression “boys and their toys”, although more usually applied to grown men and their desire for sports cars, expensive stereos and unnecessary gadgetry, instantly sprang to mind as Michael Davis, head sommelier – or wine director, as he prefers to be known – at central London’s Chancery Court Hotel, proudly showed off his latest piece of kit, a Cruvinet wine preservation system. “It’s one of the most expensive they’ve ever made,” he assured me, before pointing out the quality of the stainless steel used in its construction. “And this Cruvinet is unique in the UK,” he continued. “All others, for example at the Hotels du Vin, Isola or Atlantic, have nitrogen tanks – this is the only one with a nitrogen generator.”
But before dismissing such detail as merely schoolboyish one-upmanship, Davis’ baby, his shiny new toy, has already had a significant impact on sales in the hotel. In The Chancery Court’s new restaurant, Pearl, where the Cruvinet is housed, or, more to the point, proudly displayed as the centrepiece in the bar, pushing the selection of spirits to either side of it, the effect has been instantly noticeable (the restaurant – which replaced “QC” – only opened in July). “In the old days we’d hope for a spend of £8.50 per person at lunchtime on wine, and now we’re hitting £20 to £25,” notes Davis. “And at dinner this is anywhere from £40/£50/£60 per person – the margins have just been phenomenal.” Furthermore, it’s had other interesting effects on drinkers too – forget that stereotypically Chardonnay girl, for instance, Pearl’s customers are craving something groovy, something Austrian …
But how has the introduction of an upmarket wine preserver and server had such an effect? Well, the Cruvinet, or rather Grand Cruvinet has allowed Davis to serve 32 fine wines by the glass for both diners and bar dwellers alike (there are also 12 house wines by the glass which are not kept in the Cruvinet). This has given Davis the opportunity to tempt customers to try different varieties, while trading up to more expensive wines, as well as ensuring diners drink styles that actually go with their food. The technology itself is surprisingly simple. Effectively the bar contains two 16-bottle units bolted together, and each unit comprises two compartments, one for white wine and the other for red. The front of the Cruvinet has 32 taps, each for dispensing the wines, and as a glass of wine is poured, a glass’s worth of nitrogen fills the bottle, preventing any oxidation of the remaining wine. The nitrogen is literally stripped from the air by the generator, and the advantage of this system compared to the tank-sourced nitrogen version is that “on a busy Saturday night, you don’t run out”. Furthermore, Davis suggests the cost of the electricity used in running the generator is cheaper than buying the gas. Aside from this, however, the real point of the Cruvinet is that it keeps wine fresh, once opened, for up to six weeks, which means Davis only needs to sell one glass per week of each wine to avoid any wastage. Nevertheless, the initial capital outlay isn’t insignificant. Davis’ all-singing and dancing unit cost £30,000.
Before going any further it is important to point out a few facts about Davis, and how he managed to persuade the Chancery Court Hotel’s owners – Hotel Property Investors (HPI) – to part with their money for the Cruvinet. For a start he’s American, and he began his love affair with wine, aged 16, in the Loire, where he discovered Vouvray – which he drank before “bad jug wine in the States”. Later he studied French and finance, followed by an initial career in restaurant management, before he started buying wines for a few restaurants in Chicago. “I won Wine Enthusiast magazine’s Outstanding Restaurant Wine Award two years in a row for two different restaurants just for programmes that were unusual,” he says, before adding, “Wine Spectator tends to give awards for who has the most wine whereas Wine Enthusiast gives them for interesting concepts.”
These “unusual” programmes included “doing 50 wines by the glass” as well as wine flights “which nobody was doing in Chicago back then”. This meant, as Davis comments, “It was rather easy to recreate it [the wine by the glass/wine flight concept] over here, especially as I would have much better equipment. When I did it in the States it was using Vacuvin.”
Anyway, after Davis’ restaurant wine buying roles and before his move to the UK, he acted as sales manager for Constantino Signature Wineries – “a boutique, high quality Napa Valley winery”. Nevertheless, two and a half years ago Davis headed to the UK with his British partner and now has “indefinite leave to remain”. As he says of living in Chicago versus London, “You fly one hour out of Chicago and you’re in Detroit – oh boy, what fun is that? You fly one hour out of London and you can be in any wine producing region you want.”
Once here, Davis secured a sommelier’s position with Pont de la Tour, then a restaurant management position with Rules – “They used me through the holiday season and then said we don’t need a third manager anymore” – and finally with the Chancery Court as wine director, where he intends to remain.
The overriding urge to develop by-theglass sales, is strongly connected to Davis’ background. “A wine bar in Chicago I used to sell to had a similar unit but made by a competing company – who can’t make them anymore because they were sued [by Cruvinet] – and it had 100 wines by the glass. And if you imagine the Cruvinet here holds 32 wines, then the one in Chicago was three times as long. Anyway, it was called the Hudson Club, and it did 100 wines by the glass on Cruvinet and the place was just mobbed. Beautiful people drinking nice glasses of wine – they filled the bar, filled the restaurant – it was a great concept. It opened about seven years ago and I just thought it was something I’d never seen in the London scene and something I thought London needed – I mean, good wine consumption is just rockin’ over here. People may be drinking less, but they are definitely drinking high quality – and if you don’t want to spend £150 on a bottle of wine, why not spend £25 on a glass?”
Mixing and matching
Now the whole system is up and running at Pearl – so named because the space the restaurant occupies was once the banking hall of the Pearl Assurance building – Davis is noting, that people are more willing to experiment. The choice of wines for the Cruvinet will change seasonally but the basis for the selection is to have wines from all over the world. “You’ve got Lebanon, Italy, France, Spain, the States, Australia, New Zealand, Austria. And there are more whites now, and those on the lighter side, although there are still some bold oaked ones too.”
In particular, Davis has spotted that, “With diners – and we didn’t do this on purpose – people, instead of ordering bottles of wine are having it by the glass. You always have four people and they always seem to have one sea bream, one duck, one veg option and one mullet, and they’re asking you, as the sommelier, to pick the perfect wine for all four of their dishes – and you can’t. So what a lot of people are doing is, with their starters, they are having one wine for each person and then doing the same with their mains and then if they want to go onto a dessert wine they will. And with four people this ends up at just about two bottles of wine, which is generally what you would have – a white and a red – but instead each wine is tailor-made for the dish they’ve chosen.”
Davis recalls, “We had quite a slow night last Friday [early August] but the spend came to about £100 per person in the dining room.” This does include drinks sold in the bar – “because the PoS system can’t break it out” – but the Cruvinet “has doubled or tripled sales, which is exactly where we want to be.”
Davis also observes that people “are definitely trading up and, in the bar list, all Cruvinet wines are given a short two to three sentence description, which helps the barman or cocktail waitress and allows the customer to choose for themselves.” For instance, the most expensive wine by the glass from the Cruvinet is Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1995 at £39. Beneath its listing it reads: “A second growth Pauillac from a great vintage that is just starting to come around after nine years! If you haven’t tried Bordeaux with good bottle age by the glass now’s your chance!”
But to return to the issue of the Chardonnay girl, Davis remarks, “I sell more Gruner Veltliner than I do house white – what fun is that? The top three whites are Gruner, Albarino and Gavi di Gavi. Yes we sell a fair bit of Pouilly Fumé and Chablis and those things, but the top three whites are definitely those, which is very unusual – I mean, Austria, Spain and Italy.”
Taking flight
The anomalously high sales of less popular wine varieties from Pearl’s Cruvinet is partly explained by Davis’ wine flights, in particular his popular “Aromatic Whites” flight, which includes an Albarino from Pazo de Senoras, a Gruner Veltliner “Kaferberg” from Loimer Langenlois and a Riesling “Mesh” from Yalumba in South Australia. “I do a flight programme,” says Davis, “which I know another restaurant in town does but mine’s a bit different from theirs, which is Italian whites and Italian reds. We currently have five flights, and they will change seasonally, but I’d like to have seven or eight.”
However, the real problem for Davis is not storage, or wastage, the traditional drawback of offering a range of flights, but legislation. “We have to follow the law, and the flight is challenging because it’s three glasses of 125ml,” he explains. Each glass must contain a minimum of 125ml of wine “to satisfy the council and the weights and measures act,” although Davis does report that “the other place does five glasses of 75ml and that’s a no no, but it’s not like anyone’s ripping people off.
“Anyway, because we’ve got to do 125ml the flight is rather large, it’s half a bottle of wine, but in one sitting you can have, for example, three different Chardonnays from all over the world.”
Davis has, in fact, approached Camden Council to see if an exception could be made but “they said no, that’s the law, and I should write to Parliament – and I’m like okay, I’ll get right onto that,” Davis says in a sarcastic tone. He concedes, “I can understand why the laws were passed, but I don’t think we’re trying to rip off the customer, we’re trying to educate them and get them to try something new.”
However, Davis is going to persevere within the law, and thinks he might be able to “play around a bit” when it comes to Port flights, or maybe even spirits.
And as for covering the costs of the Cruvinet? Davis notes, “Well, I know how much our sales were in July and if you go on sales alone it is already paid for, but yes it will probably take a year to pay for it once you take off costs.”
Overall, Pearl’s chef Jun Tanaka, with his modern French menu, is hoping to earn a Michelin star, while Davis thinks his wine list can win a Spectator award – “I think there’s enough depth to it, and again there isn’t really anybody else doing it.” At which point he makes the interesting observation, “And I notice that a lot of our customers are women, drinking very good wine. I would say last week 85% of the people at the bar were women.”
Then, after a pause, I question whether Davis would have instigated his wines by the glass programme somewhere else had the Chancery Court Hotel refused to fund it. “Yeah,” he answers confidently.