Why is wine so expensive in restaurants? What can you do about it?
Wine is a cash cow for restaurants. It is not uncommon for a restaurant to sell a bottle of wine for over a 300% mark-up on the retail price of the same bottle (and the restaurant often doesn’t even pay the retail price). Wine by the glass is a particularly insulting activity since the consumer quite often covers the entire cost of the bottle by purchasing just one glass (while the restaurant may be able to pour 5 – 7 more glasses from that bottle). The situation amounts to a “legitimized mugging of the consumer” according to wine critic Robert Parker.
To be fair, wine is capital intensive. Restaurants have to allocate storage space on the premises for wine and hopefully that storage area is temperature controlled. The expensive strategy for a restaurant’s wine cellar is to buy and hold a large inventory. The less expensive way is to have the local distributor make deliveries once or twice a week. However, this second strategy has its pitfalls in that the restaurateur loses control of the wine list to the distributor’s portfolio of wines. This is a leading cause of why restaurants with good food serve frustratingly bad wine.
Training the staff can be time-consuming and expensive but this is not always the case. When the restaurant has a sommelier, or wine steward, that person must have been trained. The most prestigious training for a sommelier is the Master Sommelier, a degree that is difficult to achieve and also rare (only 51 currently in the US). However, fewer and fewer restaurants—including even some top restaurants—are taking the time to have a sommelier and instead provide all wait-staff some wine education. Actually, wine producers visiting from California or local distributors are often the ones who undertake this education. Learning by doing seems to be in fashion. That’s a fine approach when it comes to wine but it is decidedly less expensive. The cost savings could be passed on to consumers.
What can you do about this situation? Well, not all that much really. One approach is simply not to buy wine in restaurants that have excessively high mark-ups. But because fine food and fine wine complement each other, this strategy may not be the most enjoyable. Many restaurants will let customers bring in their own wines and then charge a “corkage fee” ranging from $3-10 (sometimes even more). This can be a good way to get around the markups since a really good $30 bottle of wine from a wine shop could fetch over $70 in a restaurant. However, many restaurants recognize this as an end run and it is best to call first to confirm that it is accepted practice. Short of sending a blatantly offending restaurant a letter, voting with your feet (or your pocketbook) is an effective way to send a message.
