Aivin

For wine directors: the list on paper is not the list in the bins.

Nobody finds out until a table orders the fourth course. Load the menu at tonight’s cover count and Aivin names what the bins cannot cover, what is short for the room, and what to open instead — before the first seating. Then it writes depletion back when you close the service.

Get your free cellar report Pairing Studio

Photograph — Adrien Olichon / Unsplash

The week, as it actually runs

  1. MondayOne page of findings ordered by consequence within a value basis. Not an alert feed — three things, each with what it is worth and what to do about it.
  2. ThursdayCoverage on the weekend menu. Two courses the bins cannot cover at forty covers, one short, and the buy list to fix it while the distributor rep can still get it to you.
  3. Friday, five o’clockDefended pours per course, bin numbers, glassware, service temperature, and the tableside line. On a phone, in the cellar, with no signal.
  4. Friday, one in the morningClose out. The bottles come off. Nobody types anything into a spreadsheet.

The objection, taken seriously

Nor would we sell you one. It argues, names the near-miss it avoided, and asks one question every time you overrule it: why. Tagged, attributed to you, and exportable.

Over a season those corrections are the house’s judgment base rather than feedback for us. New hire on Friday gets the same structural argument and the same near-miss you would have named. That is the part that survives your leaving.

We do not need a robot picking our wine.

Reasonably, every wine director

What to ask any vendor in this category

Three questions that separate people who have worked a floor from people who have not. Ask what happens to a lot with no market reference — if the answer is anything other than "carried at cost and excluded", walk. Ask whether a magnum is priced as two bottles. Ask what the tool does when a course has no good pairing.

We put those answers on the page rather than waiting to be asked, which is either confidence or the only honest way to sell into a trade that has been oversold. Both, probably.

Questions people ask first

How do I know if tonight’s pairing can be poured before service?

We 86’d a course halfway through second seating last Friday.

Load the menu at tonight’s cover count and Aivin does the bottle math per course, then names what the bins cannot cover and what to open instead. Six courses at three ounces is eighteen ounces a guest, so forty covers is three bottles a course and you need two behind it. That screen is Pairing Studio, $225 a month per property.

Will this help me get wine cost down?

The GM wants beverage cost under thirty and I am at thirty-four.

Indirectly, and the honest mechanism matters. Aivin does not renegotiate with distributors. It finds the capital sitting in lots that have not moved in a year, the bottles past their window still priced as though they were young, and the by-the-glass exposure nobody has costed. Repricing and pouring those is where the points come from.