If this is true, it does not apply to wine. Right now we have high competition and collapsing demand.
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Itās an academic definition not an absolute. Just roll with the idea and play along.
Iām curious what (if anything) can be done on the restaurant side of things. I realize alcohol margins are big moneymakers, but making wine (especially bottles) more accessible for patrons could go a long way to increase the popularity. Iām seeing lists in NYC getting closer to 2x pricing, and places with brand new models are opening up as well. Iām thinking of a restaurant and wine shop in New Jersey called Cree Wine Company - you can buy any bottle off their list at retail price and drink it in the restaurant for a flat $30 corkage fee. They also have a massive btg list with options for 3 or 5oz pours. Would love to see more places like this opening up and barriers to entry get lower across the board. Keep your margins high on liquor and beer, but what is the point of charging so much for wine when no one is ordering it?
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Pretty simple.
Wineries have priced themselves out of the market. Boomers are buying fewer wines because we have plenty of wine and cannot really buy wine to age anymore. Younger people have become disgusted with wine prices and drink cocktails or higher end bourbon and/or scotches or smoke pot, etc.
Wineries that are doing well will continue to price as high as the market will bear.
Wineries that cannot sell wine at current prices will have to reduce prices. If they cannot do that and make money, they will have to cut costs (do they really need the heavy bottles, for example) or go out of business.
The market will take care of the issue.
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I somehow donāt think bottle sales at restaurants is the path to increasing wine consumption. Changing packaging and dispensing options, think outside the bottle, will make it more ubiquitous and likely less expensive.
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Restaurants better find options. At current prices, a lot of people are going to fine restaurants and buying a glass of wine (or no wine at all) because of the unbelievable prices there. This may not apply to some small 3 star restaurants, but it applies to most restaurants.
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Thatās not a brand new model. About 20 years ago a place out here opened the retail shop attached to a restaurant. You can go in and buy a bottle and pay $10 corkage to drink it with dinner. They sell a ton of wine. Good wine. Because they are a restaurant they are able to purchase the wine at by the Glass pricing which is better than other retailers pricing.
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Where I live (Philadelphia) itās a nightmare currently. Not only are lists still 3-4x, they are bought by restaurants at retail price due to archaic state laws that still exist. On top of that, some places will not allow corkage at all, and then I donāt go there lol. We used to have a very robust byob scene here but it has been slowly dwindling
Sorry, new for my general area. Itās the only one of its kind that Iām aware of. California has a much much better wine scene in general, and are years ahead for the most part. People drink miller lights and vodka drinks here lol
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Still a ton of fruit bomb, oak chip, sugar added crap wine on the market. Iāve told the reps to not even bring the crap in for tastings.
Our chefās 25 year old daughter was in town and sat with us for a tasting when a rep pulled a bottle of the crap wine out. Marked down from $13.50 to $9.00. Her exact words after tasting were ā shit like this is why my aged friends have stopped buying wine. We open the bottle and then pour most of it down the drain! A waste of money at any price!ā
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I began the thread, as I was reading an article in World of Fine Wine, describing most of the problems.
If you can access the article by Chloe Ashton, it is a really insightful look at the Bordeaux market, and why the marketing model is in so much trouble.
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David,
Hereās the challenge - many wineries do not want to sell āBTGā pricing for retailers because oftentimes retailers will not mark the bottles up accordingly and will instead sell them very inexpensively. Great for consumers - sucks for wine club members, etc . . .
Cheers
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Understood but itās a busy restaurant and bar first. Actually two of them
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Bring back Bartle & Jaymes! (āThe folks down at the post office liked it a lot.ā)
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My daughter, whoās been trying to get back into wine marketing but finding it near impossible, sent me this link to an article at Wine-Searcher. Kinda nails whatās being said here.
https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2025/11/are-we-there-yet-wines-search-for-rock-bottom
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IMHO about 20% of wine brands need to/will go away. 100,000 acres need to be removed, and many of them planted to other crops. Most times a vineyard is replanted the subsequent planting is more productive than the one removed. Farming costs have gone out of sight, fertilizer, fungicides not to mention a finite and aging labor force. Weāve seen great strides in mechanical harvesting and I suppose weāll see other advancements in other areas like suckering.
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When I worked in a tasting room on a typical busy summer weekend weād sell a lot of glasses, āsomeā bottles, but we also offered wine cocktails, think sangria like. Weād go through 3-4 or more big batches of the cocktails. They were a hit with the ladies groups and funny thing they were the most profitable. There were two bottles of wine per batch and it would yield 30 cocktails at $10/each.
Donāt dismiss wine alternatives as a gateway drug.
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I think thereās a pro-wine bias here that most of us canāt get away from. We like wine, so we assume if restaurants sold wine cheaper, more people would buy wine in restaurants, and those restaurant experiences would create epiphanies, or at least interest, that would make people buy more wine to drink at home.
I donāt think thatās necessarily true. A lot of people I know donāt buy wine in restaurants because they donāt drink wine or have any interest in wine. If they drink alcohol, itās generally beer, cider, or cocktails and most of them donāt give a lot of thought to those choices either. Iām sure high retail prices and high markups in restaurants donāt help, but I think the bigger issue for a lot of folks is that theyāre just not that interested in wine so theyāre unwilling to commit a lot of time or money to something thatās a cursory interest at best.
We seem to have this idea that thereās some hidden key we can find that can make wine more interesting to people where theyāll be as enthusiastic as we are. I donāt think thatās true. Iām not a big sports fan. Making tickets to games cheaper or having someone explain to me why someone is the greatest player isnāt going to change that. Cheaper tickets might make me go once, but it wonāt make me a huge fan who goes all the time.
Because weāre enthusiasts, I think we lose sight of the fact that alcohol is an increasingly uninteresting subject for a lot of people. A lot of hobbies go out of style or become less popular over time. Maybe wine is one of them.
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You are correct on most of this. The problem arises when someone pays $20+ for a glass of Meiomi in restaurants when the bottle sells for close to that and the wine is terrible. From that point on they have a bad experience with wine and the majority of non-wine drinkers couldnāt tell you the difference between grapes, styles, regions, etc.
How does a non-wine drinker overcome severely overpaying for a terrible glass of wine in a restaurant? They may never want to order wine again. We need better wines in restaurants at better price points.
People are going to order whatever alcoholic beverages they want to drink but when the options arenāt always great or good to begin with its hard to get any secondary business off that.
Your analogy of a non-sports fan is spot on though. How do people know they donāt like wine if they havenāt tried any or if the wine they have tried is just terrible?
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Other than the obvious problem of so many not drinking at all I think it is a very different problems for various segments. The maker of $20 Lodi wines has a different problem than a premium Napa cab producer etc. or Bordeaux domain etc.
It is a very good question though.
As for the first problem I really think the the wine industry needs to go on the offensive and highlight that yes alcohol can be bad but wine is the most healthy type of alcohol, the most culturally significant and an integral part of eating and drinking well in moderation.
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