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Wine Training For Servers » Wine Online
Marnie Old, one of Philadelphia’s top sommeliers and wine trainers, believes wine education for restaurant servers is essential but rarely as effective as it should be.
“Most restaurant training programs skip over the big picture in order to focus on complex specifics, like grapes, appellations, and vintages. Some simply introduce new pours at pre-shift meetings with a brief description but give little in the way of context or guidance,” she says.
For this reason, Old has developed an online wine training course for restaurants, called “Wine Online,” at the University of Delaware’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. The course consists of four 40-minute video and printable lectures with topics including how to taste and describe wine, why wines taste so diverse, and how wine and food flavors intersect.
Each lecture is followed by a 40-minute video tasting lab. For the labs, Old recommends ten widely available types of wines similar to those she is sipping in the video, and she helps students identify and define what they are tasting.
Enrollment for the wine training program is $175 per person, but restaurateurs can purchase a block of ten enrollments at the discounted price of $750. Return on investment is assured, says Old. She promises the course will teach servers “wine fundamentals that enable servers to learn more, learn faster, and, ultimately, sell more wine.” ~ABA
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