Weekend wine guide: How to reduce wine list anxiety when eating out
When I was at university and working part-time as a wine steward, diners often froze when I approached the table. Wine still has “a lot of pomp and ceremony around it”, says prominent chef Al Brown. “You hand someone a wine list and it’s saying, ‘Here, have some anxiety.’”
Ordering wine in a restaurant can be a lot more stressful than simply plucking a bottle from a supermarket shelf. While spending much more than on other occasions, you may also be struggling to pronounce words like viognier, gewürztraminer or Moet & Chandon.
There are big costs in running a restaurant – rent, wages, electricity, insurance – so don’t expect wine to be cheap. Food preparation involves highly perishable ingredients, but wine and other alcoholic beverages are more durable and a lot less labour intensive, offering the restaurateur an opportunity to make high profit margins.
The standard practice is to double, treble or quadruple a wine’s wholesale price. A bottle with a wholesale price of $13 plus GST, which would probably sell in a retail store for about $20, is likely to appear on a restaurant wine list for about $60.
Ordering wine by the glass can make for even more expensive sipping. In the US, the retail price of the first glass is generally expected to recover whatever the restaurant paid for the whole bottle. Here, a 750ml bottle bought by a restaurant at a wholesale price of $13 (plus GST) will typically be sold in a 150ml glass for $12.
One way to save money, if a uniform percentage mark-up has been applied, is to order one of the cheaper wines. Fortunately, some restaurants are prepared to apply a lower percentage mark-up on expensive wines.
Is it true that the sales of the second-cheapest wine on a restaurant list outstrip the others? Yes. Many of us want to save money without looking like absolute cheapskates.
Another popular way to cut your wine spending is to eat at BYO restaurants, which will charge you a corkage fee, typically $10-15. Sometimes, it’s a lot less (even nothing), or it costs significantly more, to have waitstaff open and serve your bottle, covering glassware, service and overhead costs.
Wine of the week
Jules Taylor Marlborough Chardonnay 2025
Already delicious, this is a great buy. Grown in the Southern Valleys and partly barrel-fermented, it is fragrant and weighty, with good intensity of ripe, peachy flavours, hints of toast and butterscotch, considerable complexity and a well-rounded finish. (13.5% alc/vol) $22
