Carpe Vino Earns Wine Spectator Award of Excellence

On the throes of celebrating its 10th anniversary in business, Carpe Vino has just received a fabulous birthday gift: it has earned the coveted “Award of Excellence” from Wine Spectator magazine, recognition for the breadth and depth of its restaurant wine list. There are three levels of awards and less than 3,800 restaurants worldwide made the grade in 2012.

“This couldn’t come at a better time,” said Drew Moffat, co-owner and wine director of Carpe Vino. “We’ve always had the wine to qualify, but never a printed wine list because our inventory is so volatile.”

That changed this year when Drew worked with a database consultant to create an innovative digital wine list, using the Kindle Fire as the platform. More than 250 wines are presented, mirrored from Carpe Vino’s online wine store, with content updated automatically four times each day.

“The acknowledgement from Wine Spectator is another marker of our performance,” Drew said. “Along with our 2012 Top 100 Restaurant and Top 50 Wine List People’s Choice awards from OpenTable, we couldn’t be more proud of what our entire team has accomplished this year.”

From Gary: This achievement puts Carpe Vino in the company of truly accomplished restaurants with world-class wine selections. Since we started life ten years ago as a pure wine shop, we have an important advantage. Yet it took a lot of hard work on Drew’s part to create the systems we needed to not only dramatically improve our Internet wine business, but also to build our digital wine list. As far as I know, we may be the first restaurant to use a Kindle Fired-based system and the first to have earned Wine Spectator recognition with a digital-only wine list.

It has taken ten years of constant incremental improvement to get to this place, and I have to say it feels pretty damned good.