The Mario Batali $50 corkage thread got me thinking about this. Instead of having a flat rate for all corkage, why don’t restaurants just set the corkage fee based on what you’re bringing in. If you’re bringing in a bottle of 1982 Latour, they can waive corkage. If you’re bringing in a bottle of Kendall Jackson, they can charge you $100.
If I’m a chef at a sexy restaurant, I’d love for people to think that my food is the kind of food that goes with a 1982 Latour. I’d love for people to be seen drinking that wine in my restaurant. I’d want the bottle prominently displayed.
The idea, of course, is to set the price to encourage or discourage certain types of corkage. If, for example, you bring in something that’s on the list, the corkage fee is say 1/2 the price of the list price. The message is: “Don’t bring wine that we carry.” If you bring something cheap or mass produced (Kendall Jackson or Veuve Cliquot), you get hit with a really big corkage fee (Batali’s $50 would do it). Then there’s a sliding scale on the wine. Bring a first growth - fee waived. If you bring something the chef wants to taste, fee waived, but you’ve gotta give the chef a glass.
I’d even encourage people to email me ahead of time and inquire what the corkage fee would be. It’d be a fun parlor game.
I think setting a high fee would already discourage the Kendall Jackson crowd. Generally, if I’m paying significant corkage (say > $20/bottle) I am going to select a nicer bottle to “justify” the fee.
Separately, I don’t think restaurants make all that much from food. There’s a lot of overhead and not every night is going to be packed.
There are way too many wineries and wines out there for the restaurant to have any idea most of the time anyways. You think the chef where you go out to eat knows about Lopez de Heredia, Bernard Baudry, Cabot, Tercero, Mongeard-Mugneret, Marcel LaPierre and Lillian, and then all the different wines they and so many others produce?
But your comment raises an issue – we here at places like WB think of everyone bringing special and distinctive bottles of wine to nice restaurants, but I imagine a pretty high percentage of the time (varying depending on the restaurant), it’s just people bringing a bottle of La Crema they bought at Ralph’s on the way over to save money.
I don’t think there is any solution, since you’d create a negative firestorm if you judged patrons’ wines to be too lowbrow either by disallowing them or penalizing them with a high fee, but it is one sense in which I am a little sympathetic to the restaurants’ side of the corkage debate.
The solution is easy = charge something reasonable but not burdensome. $20 feels about right in general. Complementing that, have a firm “no wines that are on our list” policy. That covers virtually everything you need to cover. It won’t stop the cheapskates, but you’ll be assured of at least a $20 margin on their $15 bottle and hey, they’re business.
Crabtree Kittle House (one of the great lists in NE US) started a free corkage night when recession hit. Now, great list at fair prices, but sometimes I like to not spend a lot of money, so took my wife and a bottle of decent mid-tier 80s Bordeaux. Great service, nice stems, etc. But I noticed that the closest tables had a Bearboat PN , a Louis Latour Macon, and a Australian or Chilean wine with an animal on label. In the end it doesn’t make a difference to night’s profits, but that must be disheartening (and I’m guessing those that choose free corkage night to take their $8 wines probably aren’t great tippers, so hard on staff).
I think the fairest pricing is corkage is same as lowest priced bottle on winelist.
We had regular customers, an elderly couple, that came in to the restaurant weekly. They were in at 6pm just about every Sat. They loved the food (a rather exotic menu with all kinds of interesting ingredients). They always brought a bottle in with them, usually a cheap generic cab or chard. I remember once they brought in this rose, iirc it was an older vintage maybe 5-6 yrs out. As I poured it, I could see the brownish hue, and thought I could finally sell them a bottle. Clearly I underestimated the palate of the gentleman, as he declared it great after sampling. Needless to say, I never charged them corkage.
Our corkage policy included the right to kindly decline corkage. Just in the way a chef will decline changes to dishes, we only declined bottles on our list.
My thoughts on corkage, offer the waiter/waitress a glass, hope they waive a corkage fee on one of the bottles, if they don’t… oh well. Works about 80-90% of the time for me.
Not always the case as you would think. Believe it or not, a lot of folks don’t care about wine. My story above illustrates this quite well as the couple were nice tippers (25%).