Faculty & Research
Optimizing a Personal Wine Cellar
Vol 8 No 5
By: Gary M. Thompson Ph.D. and Stephen A. Mutkoski Ph.D.
Executive Summary: This report takes what we believe to be the first scientific approach to optimizing a personal wine cellar. We identify the key factors related to optimizing a personal cellar: performance metrics, such as drinking the best possible wine; constraints, such as budget and cellar capacity; and decisions, specifically what to buy and when to consume the purchased wines. We describe the Personal Wine Cellar Optimizer, which is a tool designed to identify the optimum cellar management plan. Using scenarios differing in cellar capacity, cellar life, and wine budget, we examine how the constraints affect the optimal cellar management plan. Using an example of a real cellar, we also illustrate how the recommendations can be used to improve the cellar management. This report is cosponsored by The Vance A. Christian Beverage Management Center, Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.
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- Optimizing a Personal Wine Cellar By: Gary M. Thompson Ph.D. and Stephen A. Mutkoski Ph.D.
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Other Reports or Articles You May Find of Interest
- An Analysis of Bordeaux Wine Ratings, 1970-2005: Implications for the Existing Classification of the Médoc and Graves, by Gary M. Thompson Ph.D., Stephen A. Mutkoski Ph.D., Youngran Bae , Liliana Ielacqua and Se Bum Oh
- Customer Satisfaction with Seating Policies in Casual-Dining Restaurants, by Sheryl E. Kimes Ph.D. and Jochen Wirtz
- Restaurant Capacity Effectiveness: Leaving Money on the Tables, by Gary M. Thompson Ph.D.
About Gary M. Thompson Ph.D.
Gary M. Thompson is a professor of operations management in the School of Hotel Administration, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in operations management. Previously he spent eight years on the faculty of the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. He holds a BS with first class honors from the University of New Brunswick, an MBA from the University of Western Ontario, and a PhD in operations management from The Florida State University. His current research focuses on optimizing restaurant table mixes, on optimizing conference schedules to improve attendee satisfaction, on course scheduling in post-secondary and corporate training environments, and on the effects on customer service of labor staffing and scheduling decisions. His research has appeared in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, Decision Sciences, the Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, Naval Research Logistics, Operations Research and other journals. He has consulted for several prominent hospitality companies and is the founder and president of Thoughtimus, Inc., a small software development firm focusing on scheduling products.
For more information visit http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/faculty.html?id=84
About Stephen A. Mutkoski Ph.D.
Stephen A. Mutkoski is the Banfi Vintners Endowed Chair of Wine Education and Management at the School of Hotel Administration, where he has taught since 1972. He received his BS from Cornell University in 1967 and his PhD in 1976. A former food and beverage manager and restaurant owner, Mutkoski has been able to combine his professional career with his love of food and wine. He teaches several food and beverage management courses in both the academic programs and the executive education program at Cornell. His “Introduction to Wine” class has an enrollment of over 700 students each term. In the past 23 years he has taught over 33,000 Cornell graduates about the pleasures of wine and the fascinating story behind each label. He conducts food and beverage management executive education seminars and lectures on wine throughout the world. He and his wife, Patricia, have authored and published a series of interactive multimedia training/educational programs on the wine producing regions of the world called The Wine Professor®. The Wine Professor programs are used by consumers, educators and beverage professionals. He is the author of two distance learning courses: “Foodservice Management Systems: Issues and Concepts”, and “Foodservice Management Systems: Operations”, which were published by eCornell. He writes a quarterly wine column for the Cornell Hotel School alumni magazine. He also serves as a food and beverage management consultant to several hotel, restaurant, airline and cruise line companies. In 2006 the European Wine Council selected Mutkoski for their Wine Educator of the Year award. For more information visit http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/faculty.html?id=55
