Letters to the Editor
Published In Wine X Magazine
Vol 2.1
Restaurant Wine Pricing
Fair? Or is it adding insult to injury.
Subject: Wines by the Glass
It’s incredible the price one has to pay for wine by the glass. Prices keep spiraling upward. This is insane. Restaurants are losing many of my friends — and me — who simply have one glass instead of the usual several each. Stop the madness!
Sandy W.
sandyw@ltol.com
Subject: Wine Pricing in Restaurants
Wine pricing in restaurants does several things to the consumer.
First, wine lovers know exactly what they paid for their favorite wine at their wine shop, and it’s depressing and maddening to see a bottle of wine costing two or three times the retail price on a wine list. Sure, restaurants need to make some profit; they have to buy stemware, etc., but overpricing leads to my second point. High priced wines do not invite wine novices to try new wines or even wine itself. If you know nothing about wine, why pay $35 to $60 a bottle? The pricing is prohibitive. This also reinforces the myth that drinking wine can only be partaken by a certain “class” of individuals. The only solution is to bring your own wine and pay the corkage fee. Unfortunately, that’s 100 percent profit for the restaurant.
Mark Warren
mark_warren@rsco.com
Subject: Wine Prices
I didn’t work this hard to reach the top of the food chain to become a vegetarian or to drink cheap wine, but some of the nicer restaurants should have someone available to come out and give us a kiss before they screw us with some of their prices.
Dave Stroud
davids5440@aol.com
Subject: Wine Pricing in Restaurants
As a member of the wine industry, in marketing and sales, I find most restaurant wine prices to be an outrage. Here’s a product that requires little preparation, save refrigeration in the case of white wine, to serve. Only a little skill with a corkscrew, clean appropriate glassware and a deft turn of the wrist to keep spillage to a minimum.
For this we pay two to three times the wholesale price? I’ve stopped ordering chardonnay because it gags me to spend $30 for a $10 bottle of wine. Instead, I order a sauvignon blanc or another less trendy varietal because I can live with the price.
I’d love to see a restaurateur charge full retail price plus a $5 corkage fee. It seems like $60 profit per case, plus the 33 percent retail markup would be sufficient. They’d probably sell more bottles of wine in the long run.
As long as restaurants continue to insult their clientele and treat wine as a cash cow they’ll never reach the larger audience the wine industry so desperately needs.
Wine price gouging sucks.
Mike Hurst
JRpeach@msn.com
Subject: Fair Wine Pricing in Restaurants
I can’t comment on America but in Oz the people expect to pay a little more if they purchase the wine at a restaurant. If they don’t want to pay the excess tariff they go to a BYO and take it with them. You don’t pay supermarket prices for the food, and you get the wine chilled and in most places served properly. If you don’t like it don’t buy it!
Bryn Randall
v-brynra@microsoft.com
Subject: Fair Wine Pricing in Restaurants
I don’t think either side addressed the issue of fair pricing. Fair pricing will not exist unless the customers know their wines, and that means knowing the retail or wholesale price of the wine in question. Three hundred percent markup over wholesale is what’s considered fair in the restaurnat trade. Is a restaurant in Santa Rosa being fair at 300 percent when they’re in the middle of the vineyards.
Fair also means that all the customers that frequent a restaurant should be able to buy a bottle of wine to go with their meal. I can’t buy the most expensive wine on the list but I’ll damm well have a wine with my meal or I’ll exit the restaurant.
Bill Loftin
bill.lotin@wdn.com
Subject: Wine
Most restaurants only double the price of most of their wines. I don’t agree with it as a customer but as a buyer of wine for restaurants I understand the need to have a markup. If you go to the grocery store the markup’s doubled or tripled on most of the items. Everyone has to make money.
Charles Zimmermann
CharlieTuna@pwshift.com
