The cost of drinking wine at restaurants can get out of control pretty quickly. The average markup on a bottle of wine at a restaurant is 300% but that number is often as high as 600%. It’s not uncommon to see $25 glasses of wine on menus across NYC, in fact, it’s pretty normal to see $25 glasses of wine on menus.
The reasons for this massive markup aren’t cut and dry. In his new book How To Drink Like A Billionaire (Purchase Here: $15), author/sommelier Mark Oldman discusses the reasons customers get hit with such a gigantic markup on wine:
Mark Oldman writes that a typical restaurant marks up a bottle of wine at least 200%. That bottle of wine purchased for $15 wholesale, then, quickly becomes a $45 bottle of wine, and it may be marked up by as much as 400% — plastering on a $75 price tag.
“The need to cover glassware, staff wages, rent, inventory — the reasons are sundry for why wine is marked up an average of three times or 300 percent over the restaurant’s wholesale cost, and sometimes much more than that,” Oldman writes. “But to diners, wine pricing in restaurants seems less like money management and more like cash extraction.”
Oldman says aside from the costs of running a restaurant, the location and size of the establishment affect the price, as well as whether management thinks the customer will notice: “A restaurant that purchases a bottle for $5 wholesale can mark it up a dizzying 600 percent to $30 without most diners noticing,” he writes. But those same diners are much more likely to balk at a 600% markup on a $30 Bordeaux. via Business Insider
Sommelier Mark Oldman also goes on to provide tips on how to find ‘fair price’ wine, the restaurants that aren’t gouging the customer’s eyeballs out with a 600% markup in price. To learn those tips you can purchase a copy of Mark Oldman’s new book How To Drink Like A Billionaire ($15) by following that link, and/or you can click on over to Business Insider for a few of the tips!
But don’t leave without watching C-Money’s music video for ‘I Like Wine’!!!
