Take an upscale Atlanta restaurant… add a hi-end extensive wine list, brand new state-of-the-art tech and a lot of ingenuity… and what do you have? “Bones”, an old-school Steak House that has leapt into the modern age with grace and elegance. They’ve brilliantly taken Apple’s new iPad and created a living breathing (changeable) wine-list for customers to not only look at… but play with, and make choices from. The amazing part is that the menus (iPads) can now cover all of the extensive 1,350 wines, with detailed descriptions and ratings (something an old dude wearing a cumber-bun wouldn’t be able to do alone). The NewYorkTimes article we found goes into great detail about “Bones 2.0”, here’s a main highlight:
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Once patrons make sense of the touch-pad links, which does not take long, they can search for wines by name, region, varietal and price, instantly educating themselves on vintner and vintage.
Since their debut six weeks ago, the gadgets have enthralled the (mostly male) customers at Bone’s. And to the astonishment of the restaurant’s owners, wine purchases shot up overnight — they were nearly 11 percent higher per diner in the first two weeks compared with the previous three weeks, with no obvious alternative explanation.
Other restaurateurs who are experimenting with iPad wine lists, from Sydney to London to Central Park South, report similar results.
The devices seem to be spurring deeper interest in wine and empowering bolder, more confident selections, they say, potentially revolutionizing the psychology of dining’s most intimidating passage.
“I felt like they had given me the answer sheet to the test,” said Bradley D. Kendall, a Bone’s regular who recently used the iPad to select a 2005 Corté Riva cabernet franc for $102, about 25 percent beyond his usual range.
Mr. Kendall, 43, described himself as a bit of a wine poseur. He has vacationed in Italy and Napa Valley and has a cellar at home, but he cannot remember a label from meal to meal. He knows just enough, or perhaps just little enough, to become suspicious whenever a waiter recommends a vineyard he does not know.
“In the back of your mind,” he said, “you’re always thinking: ‘O.K., is this some kind of used-car special? Did they just get 200 bottles of this?’ ”
But Mr. Kendall said the ratings he found on the iPad — by the wine writer Robert M. Parker Jr. — carried credibility. He decided that the price of the cabernet franc was justified by Mr. Parker’s award of 92 points out of 100. “I found a bottle of wine that I never would have tried, and it was wonderful,” he said.
So, in a nutshell… iPads + Restaurants = higher alcohol sales. Makes perfect sense to me!
