New Wine Bar Opportunity

[GFinerty]

I have the opportunity to invest in a wine bar, but do not know the first thing about wine! Where/how should I start to learn?

[Innkeeper]

Hi GF, and welcome to the Wine Board. Here are your choices: 1. Don't do it; 2. Invest and stay completely out of it until you learn a lot. Oh, you can hang out there as part of the learning process, just don't become part of the management.

You can start your learning here, at other good sites, and from many good books. "Great Wine Made Simple" by Andrea Immer would be a good one for you to start with because she walks you through the learning process through a series of tastings.

[Thomas]

Would you open an engineering firm or a law firm without having been trained in each profession? Wine is also a profession so it takes a lot of learning to do it right.

On the other hand, there are myriad so-called wine bars throughout the U.S.--only a portion of them truly have powerful wine knowledge behind them...but you have to have someone who at least knows what to buy.

If you truly want to get into the wine business a book will be only a start. You need to take some in-depth classes.

[hotwine]

I'll add that you should look into the business background of the general partner/current owner. Find out what he/she knows about running a business in general, and a wine bar in particular. If that looks good, do some market research on the location - the demographics, performance of other businesses in the area, etc. And ask the GP/owner for a business plan; that should include reasonable projections of profit and loss for the next five years or so. Examine your potential role - would you be a limited partner? If so, there should be a partnership agreement - ask your attorney to look it over and give you his/her opinion. Do the same with your CPA - look over both the business plan and partnership agreement. Then ask yourself if you could stand to lose your entire investment. If the idea passes all of those tests, and projections look good for that market and those demographics, then you can think about giving it a shot. But the survival rate of even GOOD wine bars hasn't been very high lately - two in my area went bust last year, and they were both highly regarded and seemed to be thriving.