Wine Revenue Per Location Has Been Cut in Half at America's Biggest Italian Restaurant Chain

The 4.7 Percent Problem

No other Darden brand runs that low. Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, a value chain with no beverage identity, is at 7.0 percent. LongHorn Steakhouse is at 8.5 percent. Chuy's is at 12.0 percent. Yard House is at 30.0 percent. Capital Grille is at 26.3 percent.

The Italian restaurant with the imported wine list, the exclusive Porta Vita label developed with Cavit winery in Northern Italy, and a corporate wine program once led by Master Sommelier George Miliotes generates less alcohol revenue as a share of total sales than every other brand in its parent company's portfolio.

That single line in the 10-K tells you the alcohol percentage is low and getting lower. What it cannot tell you is why, or what changed, or which category, wine, spirits, beer, is driving the decline. Darden does not disclose the breakdown. The 10-K reports "food and beverage revenues" as a single combined line item. No brand-level beverage category data has ever appeared in an earnings release, investor presentation, or quarterly filing.

For that, you need tax records.

20,436 Filings

We analyzed every monthly audited Texas beverage sales filing submitted to the Texas Comptroller by Olive Garden locations between January 2007 and February 2026. The dataset covers 130 locations, 20,436 individual filings, and $471 million in lifetime beverage gross receipts. Each filing is broken down by category: liquor, wine, and beer. Each is audited. Each is filed under penalty of law.

The filings show what the 10-K doesn't break out: wine revenue per Olive Garden location in Texas peaked at $179,860 in 2011. In 2025, it was $87,377.

Cut in half in fourteen years.

The Divergence

The beverage decline is not happening inside a shrinking restaurant. It is happening inside a growing one.

Olive Garden's national average unit volume just hit a record $5.6 million. Same-store sales have been positive for six consecutive quarters. The brand crossed $5 billion in annual revenue for the first time in fiscal 2024 and is tracking toward $5.5 billion this year. Darden's FY2025 10-K disclosed 935 company-owned restaurants, up from 846 a decade earlier.

Applying Darden's reported national AUVs to the active Texas location count produces an estimate of total Texas revenue. That estimate grew from approximately $391 million in 2013 to $661 million in 2025, a 69 percent increase. Over the same period, total Texas beverage revenue, as reported to the Comptroller, went from $25.1 million to $24.9 million. Essentially flat.

Total revenue up 69 percent. Beverage revenue unchanged. The food business grew. The highest-margin category inside it did not.

The nationally reported alcohol mix confirms the trajectory. Darden's 10-K disclosed Olive Garden at 5.0 percent alcohol in FY2024 and 4.7 percent in FY2025, a 30-basis-point decline in a single year. The audited sales data shows the decline is not new. It has been continuous, across 19 years, with two distinct accelerations.

The Crossover

Wine's share of Olive Garden's Texas beverage revenue peaked at 58.2 percent in 2010. Liquor sat at 27.6 percent. A two-to-one ratio.

Through 2018, the decline was gradual. Wine slipped to 52.9 percent; liquor edged to 30.7 percent. Wine still held a comfortable lead of roughly $6 million a year across the Texas system.

Then 2019 happened.

Wine's share dropped 7.9 percentage points in a single year, from 52.9 to 45.0. Liquor surged from 30.7 to 39.1. In absolute dollars, wine lost $1.6 million in Texas revenue while liquor gained $2.8 million. Total beverage revenue was up. But the mix had fundamentally restructured.

The likely catalyst: a five-dollar cocktail platform launched in fall 2018 and referenced by then-CEO Gene Lee on the December earnings call. A guest who might have ordered a seven-dollar glass of Pinot Grigio could now get a cocktail for five dollars. The pricing incentive was rational. The cumulative effect was structural.

Wine never recovered. By 2022, liquor overtook wine in absolute dollar terms for the first time in the brand's Texas history. In three of the last four years, Olive Garden locations in Texas have generated more revenue from spirits than from wine.

|Year|Wine Share|Liquor Share|Wine Revenue|Liquor Revenue|Leader| |----|----------|------------|------------|--------------|------| |2010|58.2%|27.6%|$13,626,725|$6,462,158|Wine by $7.2M| |2012|57.4%|27.6%|$14,755,830|$7,095,138|Wine by $7.7M| |2018|52.9%|30.7%|$14,470,441|$8,397,779|Wine by $6.1M| |2019|45.0%|39.1%|$12,836,574|$11,153,556|Wine by $1.7M| |2022|41.4%|42.5%|$11,309,753|$11,610,253|Liquor by $0.3M| |2024|40.5%|43.5%|$10,655,156|$11,444,427|Liquor by $0.8M| |2025|41.4%|41.9%|$10,310,545|$10,435,068|Liquor by $0.1M|

The Competitive Pattern

Olive Garden is not the only Italian casual dining brand in Texas. We analyzed audited sales data for all six chains in the segment, covering 237 locations and $1.1 billion in lifetime beverage gross receipts.

Ranked by wine concentration, a pattern emerges. The four brands with wine concentration above 55 percent have all either contracted, entered bankruptcy, or posted negative comparable sales. The two below 55 percent are the segment's survivors. Olive Garden's current beverage profile now more closely resembles North Italia, the premium growth concept generating $7.8 million AUVs, than the wine-dominant identity it carried for fifteen years.

This is a correlation. Macaroni Grill did not collapse because of wine. But the pattern, wine-dominant Italian brands contracting, spirits-diversified brands surviving, is consistent across every chain in the dataset.

It Is Not Just Olive Garden

The most unexpected finding came from the broader Darden portfolio.

We pulled audited sales data on five additional Darden brands in Texas, LongHorn Steakhouse, Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, Yard House, Capital Grille, and Seasons 52, covering 221 additional locations and $1.08 billion in lifetime beverage revenue. We computed wine and liquor shares for 2012 and 2025.

Every brand showed the same shift. No exceptions.

|Brand|Wine 2012|Wine 2025|Change|Liquor 2012|Liquor 2025|Change| |-----|---------|---------|------|-----------|-----------|------| |Olive Garden|57.4%|41.4%|-16.0 ppts|27.6%|41.9%|+14.3 ppts| |Capital Grille|69.3%|56.5%|-12.8 ppts|27.4%|41.1%|+13.7 ppts| |Seasons 52|64.7%|56.8%|-7.9 ppts|31.1%|39.8%|+8.7 ppts| |LongHorn|19.8%|12.2%|-7.6 ppts|48.4%|60.0%|+11.6 ppts| |Yard House|9.2%|6.3%|-2.9 ppts|30.4%|48.1%|+17.7 ppts| |Cheddar's|5.5%|3.9%|-1.6 ppts|73.2%|80.0%|+6.8 ppts|

Capital Grille, the fine dining steakhouse with 500 wine selections and individual sommeliers, lost 12.8 points of wine share. Yard House, built on 130 draft beer taps, saw liquor gain 17.7 points, the largest spirits surge in the portfolio. The wine-to-spirits migration is happening at every price point, every cuisine, every format Darden operates. It appears nowhere in the company's consolidated financial statements.

Olive Garden's magnitude is the largest at 16 points, but only because it had the most wine share to lose.

The Delivery Factor

An honest reading of this data requires acknowledging what audited sales filings cannot show: the occasions where alcohol was never ordered.

Olive Garden's off-premise sales have grown from a significantly lower share before the pandemic to 29 percent in Q3 FY2026. Only a fraction of delivery and takeout orders include alcohol. If nearly a third of Olive Garden's occasions now produce little to no beverage revenue, that compositional shift alone explains a meaningful portion of the beverage intensity decline.

But delivery does not explain the wine-to-liquor shift within the dine-in channel. Among guests who sit down and order a drink, the preference is moving from wine to cocktails. That is a consumer behavior change, not a delivery artifact. And it is happening at every Darden brand in Texas, including brands with much lower off-premise mix than Olive Garden.

The Silence

On March 19, 2026, John Wilkerson delivered Olive Garden's Q3 FY2026 results. The earnings call covered lighter portions, breadstick refills, delivery growth, catering expansion, and beef cost hedging. Wine was not discussed. The beverage program was not discussed. A 15 percent tariff on EU wine imports had taken effect seven months earlier. Italian wine exports to the United States declined 28 percent in value in early 2026. Olive Garden's exclusive Porta Vita collection is fully exposed. The tariff impact on the brand's Italian wine supply chain was not discussed.

But wine revenue per Texas location was $155,596 in 2018, before any tariff existed. It is $87,377 now. The tariff arrived in the middle of a structural decline, not at the start of one.

Wilkerson took the brand president role on September 1, 2025, succeeding Dan Kiernan, who retired after 33 years. A 30-year Darden veteran who started as an hourly employee, Wilkerson previously ran Bahama Breeze and Cheddar's. The wine decline he inherited began in 2013. The liquor crossover happened in 2022. The 10-K's alcohol percentage dropped from 5.0 to 4.7 in the year before he took the role.

The question this data raises is not whether the shift is happening. Twenty thousand tax filings across 130 locations over nineteen years have settled that. So has the 10-K.

The question is whether it is a problem, or a plan.

Source: audited Texas beverage sales filings, January 2007 to February 2026. Darden Restaurants FY2024 and FY2025 10-K filings (SEC EDGAR). Bloomin' Brands FY2024 10-K. Brinker International FY2025 10-K. The Cheesecake Factory earnings disclosures. All beverage revenue figures derived from audited state tax filings. National average unit volumes derived from Darden 10-K and 8-K filings. Analysis by Pourcast.