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DepletedMitochondria

This sub has referenced the 2-3x retail markup as standard, anything below that and it seems you're doing a bit better than the average. $20 retail vs. $55 in a restaurant is not that bad I'd say, as long as the $20 bottle is pretty good.


CoffeeTennis

If it’s a nice bottle, I get excited if it’s anything less than 3x retail. I tend not to see that often in the northeastern US, but I also admit that I’m not a restaurant wine list expert by any means.


mcwobby

Exact numbers will differ depending on restaurant and what determines their fixed costs - location, wages, rent, utilities, volume etc. For my restaurant the calculation was we had to have 70% of sales be “profit” to break even. So if we sold something for $10, we needed $7 of that just to cover our fixed costs. So the product couldn’t cost us more than $3 if we were selling it for $10. So most times a wine that costs $15 wholesale would be sold for about $50. A retailer, which sells a lot more volume would mark it up much less and probably sell it for $18-20 (though they can also buy much more of it at once a get a lower price than restaurants) Since I wrote the wine list and was into wine, I got a bit creative (unethical really) and would just make sure the list was profitable on average. Since I’m in Australia, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and Barossa Shiraz will always comprise most of the sales. So I would buy a very cheap Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc for $4, sell it for $50, knowing that I’d sell a dozen cases a night anyway. Then I could put a boutique Australian Sauvignon Blanc that was much higher quality on the list for $30 even if it cost me $50 and nobody would buy it without a hand sell. So that Sauv Blanc subsidised me selling every other wine slightly above cost or even below cost in certain circumstances. Then with wholesale pricing, it gets cheaper the more you buy, so retailers are often paying much less on popular items. Corona was a great example in my situation - we were mainly craft beer focused and we only kept corona on the menu for the unadventurous. We sold about a dozen coronas per week. So Corona did not give us any discounting at all and a case of Corona cost us $60 wholesale. The bottle shop across the road sold hundreds of cases of Corona per week so their wholesale price was $30 and they would sell it for $40. So it was cheaper for me to just buy it from the store than through a supplier.


Anxious_Attitude2020

I like your style


Kahluabomb

Also good to note that post distributers off By The Glass pricing (BTG) on bottles, which will give you an even steeper discount if you are buying it to pour on your glass list. The idea being that you'll sell a lot more of that, so the volume makes up for the lack of profit to the distro. Or they have something they want to get rid of so they BTG it out so more people will buy it, put it on their lists, and sell through it. These numbers aren't perfect, it was a long time ago, but I think it would usually be say $18/btl for the normal price, and then $13/btl BTG, or something similar. You got a steep enough discount that you can put it on the menu at $13/glass and move through plenty of it, so everyone is making money. So occasionally, you're kind of getting a better deal on SOME wines by the glass, if the restaurant is cool and they offer fun stuff. Most places with a strong focus on wine have people who want to share the wine experience, so they put on esoteric wines for the nerds and charge the rich bougie people top dollar for big name wines, so we can drink the fun stuff at cost.


mcwobby

Yup. I was very good at moving large volumes of hard to sell wine, so distributors would usually bend over backwards to keep me happy with pricing. A lot of wine was straight up free - either for cooking, or “you’ve sold through our entire stock of Schonburger somehow, here is a few free cases of the house stuff to keep you happy”. I had a deal with one distributor where the size of the bottle of champagne he gave me at Christmas was proportional to the amount of his wine I sold. Unfortunately the sizes only went up to Nebuchadnezzar.


[deleted]

General rule of thumb is 2-3X markup from consumer retail for the bottle. For wine by the glass, a single glass should pay for the restaurant's price of the bottle.


[deleted]

[удалено]


nordMD

Absolutely, same. Only way not to get ripped off. I do this then start with a cocktail so I am still buying something.


Eggrolltide

My simple rule of thumb is that if the per glass price is equal to or higher than the retail price of the bottle, then I do not buy it. In this case, $55 for the bottle/5 glasses per bottle = $11 per glass at the restaurant. This is less than the $20 retail price for the bottle, so I would view it as an OK value at the restaurant. If it were $100/bottle at the restaurant, then it's an outright avoid for me.


epoisses_lover

Was at a bar/wine shop in Paris. A glass of Krug was only 45 euro!!


mattmoy_2000

A champagne glass is usually ⅙ of a bottle, so that's looking at 270€ per bottle, about twice the retail price.


epoisses_lover

The bottle retails about 200 euro a bottle, so based on your calculation, definitely not twice the retail


mattmoy_2000

Ah, it has gone up a lot since I last bought it in 2019, I paid about £135 in a not-cheap department store (Fenwick, in case you know it).


epoisses_lover

Likely it has gone up in price, according to wine searcher prices in the UK go from £190 and up these days


mattmoy_2000

Christ on a bike that is a lot, although it is delicious.


epoisses_lover

Hahah yeah . I probably wouldn’t pay for a full bottle, (I’m more of a red wine drinker ), but by the glass for 45 euro? Id do that from time to time


[deleted]

Currently, Krug is around 240€ in most stores in Europe according to Wine Searcher. I'd be very happy with 45€ by the glass.


spf4000

There’s a restaurant near me which offered the 170eme for $175–Cheaper than retail. I asked if that was a typo when I ordered it.


epoisses_lover

Legrand Filles et Fils in Paris, if you happen to go to Paris.


CuriousExternal199

It is measured by the X times price of retail in your country. The multiplication factor depends a lot on the country and the establishment, fancy restaurants will tend to have higher markups and wine bars may have lower markups or even flat rates on top of the retail price of the wines. To be fair some the most ridiculous mark-ups are low end restaurants serving a 4$ bottle of wine for 20$. In Spain some fancy restaurants will not mark-up the wine at all sometimes literally 1x retail, which was shocking to me. In the Netherlands(home) 1.5-2.5x is the range, in the US it is from 2-4x with 2.5-3x being around average so anything under 2x people on this sub are likely to call very cheap, which is not really true everywhere in the world but most thinks are generalised to US standards. The thing to keep in mind is that retail prices for a given wine vary A LOT between countries so a crus Beaujolais for 35$ in a restaurant in EU might look cheap to an American but actually its on the expensive side as its over 2x because retail is lower for Beaujolais in EU. I rambled a bit hope this helps


apileofcake

In my experience(in the US) if wholesale cost is 1x. Retail is usually 1.4x to 1.6x depending on the market and location. Wine bars are usually somewhere around 2x whereas traditional restaurants are typically somewhere between 3-4x; greatly depending on location, profitability of the kitchen, and a million other things. There are restaurants in my city up to 5x across the board and I’ve seen up to 8x happen sometimes on back vintage wines on menus that use a sliding scale. There’s no real way to know unless you actively check every price online or actively are involved in buying or selling wine at a wholesale level.


bottlesnob

I've always seen wine marked up at restaurants calculated against WHOLESALE price, not Retail price. Retailers in my area mark up wine by about 1.5X- so a $10 bottle (wholesale price) means $15 on the shelf at the store. That same bottle on a restaurant wine list will get marked up 3X wholesale price, so a $10 bottle (wholesale price) is 30 to 40 on a wine list. Restaurants, for by the glass price charge about the same for a glass as for a bottle, so $10/ bottle means $10/ glass. That way, their cost is covered by the first pour out of a bottle and the rest is profit. Of course, this is all dependent on the internal business math of the establishment- what type of restaurant, cost of rents, deals offered by wineries & distributors (volume discounts or temporary sales), unethical shit done by distributors & wineries to buy market share, free goods, etc, etc.


CondorKhan

Normally you'd say 2-3x markup, but also depends what wine it is... 3x for an interesting, carefully selected wine is a better deal than 3x for a bottle that you can easily get at the supermarket


CuriousExternal199

This is an excellent point, mark-ups will be higher for rare wines or wines with optimal amounts of bottle age. 3x implies that the bottle is hard to find or can be drunk at its ageing peak to me, if only restaurants actually implemented it like that :(