Before
Uncertainty · Pressure · Hesitation
You're at the table. Twelve eyes on you. The list is eight pages. You don't want to overspend and you don't want to pick wrong. This is where we meet you.
Confidence in the moment that matters.
You're at the table. Twelve eyes on you. The list is eight pages. You don't want to overspend and you don't want to pick wrong. This is where we meet you. Forty-eight hours before you arrive, a dense list becomes a short list you can trust. Three options, one confident decision, and a first pour that comes faster.
A good sherpa shows up where the climb is hardest and leaves when the view is yours to enjoy. Here is where we show up, and where we step back.
You're at the table. Twelve eyes on you. The list is eight pages. You don't want to overspend and you don't want to pick wrong. This is where we meet you.
We ask three questions, then point to two choices. The noise drops. You can see the decision now. No scores, no jargon. Just: this will work, for these reasons.
The table enjoyed the wine. The guest next to you asked how you chose. You felt good ordering it. That little afterglow is the product.
We stand with the user, not over them. No lecture, no pedestal, no tasting-room posture. The user is already capable. We just know the terrain.
Wine is already noisy. Critics, scores, regions, vintages, varieties, sommeliers. We don't add more information. We remove enough of it that a decision becomes possible.
A sherpa doesn't need you to know they've climbed Everest twelve times. They just get you up the mountain. Our expertise is in the result, never in the display of it.
Triggered forty-eight hours before arrival, the Sherpa turns a dense list into a personalized, inventory-aware shortlist. No algorithmic jargon. No scores. Just: this will work, for these reasons.
Every shortlist has the same shape. One bottle to play it safe. One to stretch a little. One to level up the evening when the moment calls for it. Tell us what the table is doing, and we fit the wine to it.
The live product runs at local-sherpa.com. Currently in closed beta with thirty-one Palm Beach venues.
Chavignol chalk, lean stone fruit, the one everyone at the table will like. You will not get a complaint here.
Gamay with backbone. Light enough for the salad, serious enough for the steak frites. A small stretch with a good payoff.
Mourvèdre with real age on it. Garrigue, cured olive, afterglow. If tonight is the night, this is the bottle.
Try the Morgon. You'll be glad you did.
The sommelier who spent months curating a grower Champagne selection that nobody orders. The beverage director with a story behind every producer on the list. Wine Sherpa is the channel through which that expertise finally reaches the table.
Recommendations drive wine purchase more than any other commercial vertical. For decades the tool for that job has been a sommelier standing at the table. We don't replace that sommelier. We extend their judgment into the moment forty-eight hours earlier, when the decision is actually being made.
Beverage carries 70 to 75 percent gross margin against 60 to 65 percent on food. A small lift in beverage performance is a disproportionate gain in net income. The wine list becomes the highest-impact surface in the restaurant, and it stops going unread.
A sherpa guides the guest. A sherpa also carries the mountain's knowledge. Without them, the mountain itself goes unexplored.
Illustrative P&L. A five-million-dollar full-service restaurant with a twenty-five percent beverage mix. A four percent beverage lift flows almost entirely to net income.
| Line | Baseline | + Sherpa |
|---|---|---|
| Beverage revenue | $1,250,000 | $1,300,000 |
| Beverage COGS (25%) | $312,500 | $325,000 |
| Gross profit | $3,487,500 | $3,525,000 |
| Operating expenses | $3,347,500 | $3,347,500 |
| Net income | $140K (2.8%) | $177.5K (3.5%) |
No new headcount. No new infrastructure. One upstream decision, multiplied across a hospitality group. Roughly five hundred and sixty thousand dollars in enterprise profit across a fifteen-unit operator.
Restaurants measure the final sale. Nobody measures the hesitation, the comparison, the rejection, or the decision that never happened. That decision path is where the intelligence lives. Every Sherpa session quietly builds it.
Which wines were opened, how long they were explored, which price bands were considered.
Side-by-side choices, style trade-offs, the moments of narrowing toward a single bottle.
Options passed over, and the preference signals hidden inside each rejection.
Final selection, confirmed against live inventory, context, and the table's taste profile.
A bet on momentum already in motion.
Wine Sherpa is live. Thirty-one venues on the list, two thousand six hundred enriched wines, and a small group of beta guests using the product every week. The next chapter funds product refinement, a controlled commercial rollout, and the build-out of the decision data layer beneath it all.
Restaurant P&L consultant delivering five hundred thousand to one million dollars of lift per location. Former Global Head of Healthcare Research at ABN AMRO. Top-three ranked analyst, ten years running.
Twenty-five years across Intel Capital, Microsoft, and T-Mobile. More than one hundred million dollars in strategic partnerships. Transformation programs for Ford, GM, Delta, and UPS.