shockingly inaccurate take, but it’s all there for anyone that wants to wade through the thread to make their own determination.
this x1000. while any individual wine is rare, great wine is not at all rare.
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I’ve wondered, how often do the restaurants actually own the inventory? I’ve wondered if perhaps the inventory is sometimes consigned / borrowed so there is mark-up paid to the actual owner and mark-up paid to the restaurant? It doesn’t seem capital efficient for restaurants to create their own cellars, versus share a common cellar or sell on consignment?
consignment is a thing, but it’s rare industry-wide. but at some restaurants, consignment can be rather sizable. broad strokes, 50% of negotiated sales price is paid to the consignor. it can be a good way to get some great items in, but it’s easy to mismanage and cannibalize purchased inventory.
sharing common cellars gets hairy and comes down to state laws. NY for example is on the strict side of the spectrum.
I don’t get the sense that aside from a select few, that consignment is all that big of a thing.
It’s also illegal. NYS law doesn’t allow for wines to be taken on consignment. So there’s that.
I’ve seen many “This is the first time XXX has posted”. This is my favorite one. And now its gone!
NY SLA law doesn’t prohibit consignment as it doesn’t mention it (in our context here). it does have a famously porous private collection provision which is used in conjunction with a purchase agreement to mimic a consignment-like relationship.
Alcoholic Beverage Control
§ 85. Purchase from private collection. Notwithstanding any other
provisions of this chapter any nonlicensed person owning bottled wine is
authorized to sell that wine to a wholesale or retail licensee
authorized to sell wine. The licensee involved in such sale shall ensure
that each bottle of wine sold from a private collection has a
permanently affixed label stating that the wine was acquired from a
private collection.
They were fining people a while back, one case in particular was quite hefty (retailer, not restaurant)
mildly curious on the facts in those cases, but the provision is 2 sentences and one is about stickers. it’s almost comical how much latitude an aggressive lawyer could find in this.
I thought if you had an equity stake in the restaurant you could consign?
As one of my NYC retailer friends once said, they keep it vague so when they need money, they create a new interpretation.
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I’ve heard that as well, however, I don’t know it to be true, or false for that matter.
that’s hysterical. i’ll leave it to the far better lawyers on this thread to opine.
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The revenue from fines on consignment sales must be miniscule.
-Al
this sounds like another myth… you can browse the entire code here; it’s rather short.
Laws of New York (abc law)
Well, 43 CL is greater than 10% less volume than 4 X 12 CL, so it’s not really a discount? Basically the same price? Of course, who knows how they actually pour. That math also seems odd to me. Even at 12 CL it’s 6.25 glasses per bottle.
There was only one time that I ever heard this was a thing. So it’s clearly not high on the priority list.
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Rules vary state to state. In AZ for example it is all Cash On Deposit of goods. No consignment or
Grey wine is allowed unfortunately.
I think this is more states than not though.
I think there is a little more than a handful of states (plus DC) that allow non-primary source wine.
This discussion is interminable. I’m not going into the details of that thread (dear God), but the premise that corkage is irrelevant* rests entirely on aggregation. Across all restaurants of course it’s not. The average restaurant in NYC is not a fine dining destination and provides a list no one on this thread cares about (do I pick from a Barolo I’ve never heard of or a Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand?). It’s also not a restaurant anyone here is especially interested in going to - or bringing wine to. So, yes on average, it doesn’t matter. But the problem with this is that there isn’t just one market, just like the dire threads we see about the future of wine because fewer people are drinking Charles Shaw.
The average wine consumer isn’t an average consumer, and the average restaurants being discussed on this forum isn’t the average restaurant. So to many restaurants we talk about, yes, corkage matters. If corkage didn’t, restaurants wouldn’t have corkage policies or think about them. High end restaurants (for example, top end omakase places) think about their corkage policies because they want that kind of clientele, but also want to charge enough for corkage to keep it profitable. I’ve had this discussion with restaurant owners and yes, it matters to them. And they do it because they want this clientele. So stating “it doesn’t matter” for restaurants generally when you aggregate Chef’s Table with Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Guy Fieri’s Flavor Town Kitchen is not a convincing analysis. Of course, part of the reason corkage “doesn’t matter” is that the pricing at these places is set in a way to discourage too much of it, which is why it would appear not to be meaningful - it takes a customer that already has a great cellar and is willing to pay $75-250 for corkage to do BYOB at some places. But that’s only because the pricing has been carefully thought out - because it matters. If you let me bring my own wine to Noz for free I might eat there weekly (well, maybe not quite weekly).
Last thing I’ll say on the subject, I hate it so much.
***I don’t think numbers on corkage are meaningful anyway; there are only a couple of restaurants I’ve been to that track it very carefully. Most places don’t get the precise number of bottles correct (many don’t bother charging). But every bottle sold is counted. I did a party for my birthday last year and brought my own wine (and then ordered a few off the list); I’m sure the 4 bottles off the list were counted off inventory, but I know the bill didn’t include the umpteen mags I brought. The metrics aren’t reliable. Another place I bring wine never puts it on the bill. I tried to get them to charge me for corkage once and they were baffled by the request 
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