The News-Gazette.com Weblog

Wine Blog

More musings on an old topic

Posted by: Trudy and Rob

Saturday, September 20, 2008 1:31 PM

I happened to catch an old episode of Home Improvement on the TV recently. In it, Tim Allen is trying to stumble his way through a fancy dinner at an Italian restaurant. As he peruses the wine list, the waiter makes a recommendation for a particular wine. Upon seeing the price, Allen's response is to ask if the listed price is for the wine bottle or the whole vineyard. We've all been there. In a recent edition of The Wine Spectator, Matt Kramer (an excellent writer and columnist, by the way) discusses what the wine cellar of the future might look like for the ordinary man, not the zillionaires for whom price is no object and will pay any price for the wine of their dreams. He argues that purchasers like these, who may or might not actually drink the wine they buy, send prices for the best wine out of reach of most of us. Forget the Chateau Rothschild and the like...most of us will be buying the more obscure stuff. It will still be very good, but we might never be able to taste the ultra high end wines unless Bill Gates or Warren Buffet invites us over for dinner and into the cellar.

It's a general rule of thumb in the wine distribution chain that every time someone touches a wine, be it distributor, retailer, or restauranteur, the price jumps by about a third. Indeed, if some restaurants only marked up by a third, we might think that we've died and gone to heaven! We've all complained about high wine pricing, particularly when dining out.

I recently ran into Paul Simpson, the wine director for the the local Piccadilly chain, while wandering around downtown Champaign. He was curious what readers of this blog (we know you're out there!) might believe to be fair restaurant pricing, so I thought I'd throw the question out to cyberspace. What do you think is a fair price for wine when dining out? I'm sure, at least to a degree, it probably depends on the occasion. If your stock price triples (good luck and congratulations on that if it happens, by the way), you might be more likely to go high end than if you were merely celebrating the end of a long work week. I imagine it also depends a bit on the quality of the wine list. Personally, I know that my purchase threshold varies with the occasion. There is, however, an upper limit where I'll just have a beer because I don't feel like being extorted at the restaurant. I'm sure that this very subjective limit varies with time and place.

So, to satisfy Paul's and my curiosity, what do you normally pay for wine out and how high might you go? What's reasonable versus extortionate? Tell us...really. Enquiring minds want to know!