Somebody put a shine on my Nobel Prize. (Not sure if it should be Economics or Peace.) Should appropriate corkage not be (thereabouts) the same as the price of the least expensive bottle of wine on the list?
If, for the sake of argument, a restaurant is willing to sell me a $20 chard with dinner, why not just take my $20, keep the chard, and open the bottle of wine that I brought?
Apologies if someone has suggested this before.
Sounds reasonable. In these parts, 9 outa 10 times the cheapest bottle will be Beringer White Zin though.
It’s probably also the most popular. ![[barf.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8943c0ebb2703c20afa757f7ca84a099bb9de70d.gif "barf")
Not exactly. You have to look at their expected profit on the wine you would have purchased if they didn’t let you do corkage. Not everybody buys their cheapest wine. And probably, if you’re enough of a geek to bring something you would have bought something decent with some margin in it. So, if you were likely to buy a 100 dollar wine that they have 60-70 bucks in, but you might not have come at all if they didn’t permit corkage, than the right answer is probably somewhere between your 20 and 60-70 and that’s where most NY restaurants are…35-40, +/-.
Corkage, not tipping - it’s why I started the new thread. (though the tipping thread is a good one.)
True - but if even a good restaurant is happy to have you drink that with dinner, they should be just as happy to take the cost of it and open your wine. (I know there is opportunity cost involved.) Hey, they even save the money they paid to get the bottle to the restaurant!
The flip side is if a spectacular restaurant has nothing less than $30 on the list, it’s fair to ask me to pay $30. If they have $75 corkage, they best have the greatest list around.
Chris, seriously. 
Some states have laws that make BYO ILLEGAL. The ones that allow it still leave it up to the discretion of the licensee. Many will allow it. Some will charge exorbitant fees. You choose whom to support, or not, based on what they are willing to do. In a perfect world we could just declare that we are wine geeks and bring our own whine wherever we want.
Why is that so hard to understand? ![[pwn.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/3/3d5d493eaefe29f8a37971ea1ffbb65a4e2b21aa.gif "pwn"){kind=small}
[suicide.gif]
![[dance-clap.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/835ce082e2fa9c96c4b7f96406bf6e9a0db882ff.gif "[dance-clap.gif]"){kind=small}
http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/showpost.php?p=2637507&postcount=34" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I don’t see what the average has to do with it. The corkage should never be more than the cheapest bottle of wine on their list. If they are willing to open their own bottle for me and serve it to me, it shouldn’t cost MORE for them to do the same with my bottle. In fact, the corkage should not be more than the lowest markup on the list, and should be less in light of the comments by others regarding the lack of risk and capital investment.
That would be good for some people that seem to have more whine than wine.
A purposeful spelling error Bruce. You definitely beat the under for identification. ![[berserker.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8600bbd4810d342b8fbd4ffb62b4f0026275fd37.gif "berserker"){kind=small}
Bruce, you are an f’n genius. I will gladly hand over the Nobel.
Wait a sec - I would think we all have problems with the archaic liquor regs, some of which are terrible for consumers. Even in a state like PA, where the regs are so bad that it creates BYO places for consumers, it’s a mixed blessing. But for the sake of this argument I’m speaking of anywhere that corkage is legal.
Of course restaurants will set it wherever they want. But for all of the debate is as to what is appropriate, Bruce (or my) suggestions for approaches to follow make sense for restaurants and are fair to consumers. If this isn’t a pertinent topic on a wine BB, I don’t know what is. But if the consumer never makes clear their expectations to restaurants, they’ll never get anything. I don’t think I’m straying from reason, here.
You’re not straying from reason. Only from logic. The business owner has the right to set his policies. You have the right to choose to frequent their establishment, or not, based on those policies and whether you agree with them.
I don’t see why your definition of “what is a reasonable corkage fee” is any more valuable than the toilet paper I just used. Obviously, the restaurants answer that question for themselves when they set their corkage fee. If your way made sense to them, they would already be doing it.
As long as the states have the rights to set the rules, and allow county and local exceptions, we will always have dissonant policies countrywide. Maybe you should focus your efforts on taking down the Supreme Court.
It has all been said, many times before. Please bring something new to the table. That is my biggest complaint. I don’t see anything unreasonable in your proposal. I simply don’t understand why you think something new will come from the same old arguments.
Actually, the only silver lining in the lousy liquor control board in PA is the fact that many restaurants don’t want to go through the hassle/expense of trying to build a decent winelist using the PLCB, so we have what must be one of the best selection of high-end BYOB restaurants in Pennsylvania, and many don’t bother charging any corkage 
I love going to Philly BYO places - but you have some tough trade-offs!
Then I guess I’m not sure why you even opened the thread or commented.
Actually, given that most restaurants fail, I doubt that they have done a much better job of addressing corkage in a way that maximizes their profits, than they have dealt with the other aspects of their business (broadly speaking).
Serge,
You are saying that you won’t go to a restaurant at all that won’t allow corkage? That’s the only way that your logic makes any sense…but the fact is that the restaurant is dealing with a wider array of clients with different utility functions for wine and they don’t have to price everything at the margin to be rational.
The correct way for the restaurant to look at it is…do I make more money if I allow corkage or not, and if I do, what’s the optimal price to charge to maximize my revenue? Since they are all trying to maximize revenue and are therefore behaving rationally in that context, its not surprising that in the marketplace, most restaurants, but not all, allow it and there’s a wide array of corkage charged by those that do.
I am going to Ouest tonight and will HAPPILY pay them $30 (and don’t tell them, but I would have paid 50!)
And I am equally confused as to why you felt the need to start a new thread about why we all should be allowed to bring our own wine into restaurants for whatever nominal cost you deem sufficient because that seems fair to you.
Maybe if you titled the thread “Every Wine Geek’s Wet Dream” instead of “The Obvious Answer” I would have had a different take on things. I don’t know what I’m getting until I read what you have to say.
Jeff,
Thank you for the rational business/economic explanation. However, you really should not be so eager to overpay for things! You and Manlin are ruining it for the Pofolks…
Hey, in NY we have a lot of restaurants with very fine wine lists…like the one I am going to tonight. I will bring either an Arkenstone, for which I paid 120 or a Schrader, for which I paid 200 to the restaurant. Wines of comparable quality and price on the list would be 300-400 and 600+. And they are going to charge me 30 bucks? I would probably have bought a Palazzo or Stewart (wines I have had there previously) if they didn’t allow corkage, had a worse wine and still spent the same money overall I am going to spend to consume my Arkenstone.
The fact that I view the 30 as a more than fair deal is part of why we chose to go there at all, so they get some more revenue from food. I am NOT in the restaurant business, but I have often heard it said that the overwhelming majority of the profit in the business is in beverages, so its not surprising that restaurants cling to their corkage policies.
What I really don’t understand is why, once you’ve accepted that some people want corkage because they are offended by the markup on inhouse wine that more restaurants (like Landmarc in the TWC) don’t reduce their markup from retail to 1.5-2x from the 3-4x that is still prevalent (which is still 3x wholesale. When they do it, they look like heroes! I believe heartily that they would sell more wine and more high priced wine by thinning the standard margins on selling their own wine.
Not necessarily, because not everybody orders the least expensive wine on the list (least of all people who have their own cellars to tap). If people who would otherwise order more expensive wines on the list instead opt to BYO, that policy would not be revenue-neutral to the restaurant. (They might make it up in other ways, such as by cultivating a loyal clientele, but that’s a complicated business judgment that you can’t replace with a simple formula.) A somewhat better formula though would be to set corkage to be equal to the restaurant’s average net profit from a bottle off its list, but this also suffers from the similar problem that the people most likely to avail themselves of the policy might be people who would otherwise order bottles more expensive than the average.
In my experience, most restaurants attempt to remedy this issue by bilking BYO customers with ripoff tasting menus and the like… but that’s another issue…
I’m not sure about the lowest priced wine on the list, but maybe the next one up would be reasonable. The restaurant is making money just for service at that point, with no investment. I understand that they might sell me a more expensive bottle, but I (like many people today) usually don’t buy expensive wines at restaurants. I am more likely to go in the first place if I can bring my own wine. Unless a restaurant is packed most nights with people ordering expensive wine, they’ll make more money by offering me a reasonable corkage fee. This past year I went to a nice place with my girlfriend and parents to celebrate my mother’s birthday. We spent what I consider a lot on wine. I called ahead to see if we could bring a bottle of Champagne to start things off. I made clear that we would order the rest of our wine off their overpriced list. (I didn’t call it overpriced) We were offered to bring the wine for a $60 corkage fee. Instead of doing that, we drank the bottle in my parents’ hotel room before going the the restaurant. We ordered the same amount of wine as we would have, but the restaurant lost out on a corkage fee that we would have paid had it been less. The type of place that this is, I’m sure they wouldn’t have lost a seating in the time it would have taken us to drink the Champagne. Their loss.