The Truth About Restaurant Wine Pricing
What really happens to your money when you buy a bottle in a restaurant.
They clocked the wine list like it owed them money. She gave it the same look you might reserve for a parking fine — one that arrived late, doubled, and came with a blurry photo of your car.
"Forty-six quid? For this? I saw it for eleven Euros in France."
She wasn’t wrong. The bottle in question — a sunny, supple Cinsault from Domaine Monplezy — does retail in shops (not restaurants) for €11.50 across the Channel, and £14.95 if you know where to look in the UK. But here, with its label lit by candlelight and surrounded by stemware we pray survives the evening, it’s £46.20. And yes, that feels like a swindle. So let’s talk about it.
A few nights back, another guest thumbed through the list and muttered, "There’s no wine under thirty quid." As if I’d personally robbed her of her right to a bargain bottle. But she’s not wrong. Our cheapest wine is £30. That’s not greed. That’s survival.
The Myth of the Markup
People think restaurants rinse you on wine. That we take a bottle we found behind Lidl and slap a 300% markup on it. That somewhere in the back, there’s a sommelier diving into a vat of cash like Scrooge McDuck. If only.
You think we’re coasting on that £29 three course prix fixe menu? Not after food, wages, rent, VAT, the gas bill, and the man who charges us £120 to fix the light fittings. Wine is one of the last things that makes the numbers work — just.
From Vineyard to Table
Here’s how it breaks down. Our house red costs us £7.50 from the importer.
We sell it at £30.
Immediately, HMRC takes a fiver in VAT. That leaves us with £25.
From that:
£7.50 goes to pay for the wine itself.
A chunk disappears into breakage — corked bottles, glasses smashed during service, wines poured and never drunk.
Staff need to be trained. Wine knowledge isn’t free.
We pay rent on a storage unit just to house our wine.
Electricity to keep the fridge humming and the bottles at a steady, cellar-worthy chill.
New glasses, again. Because someone knocked over a whole tray during Friday lunch.
That remaining £17.50 has to pick up the tab for everything above — from the broken glassware and staff training to the fridge electricity and storage unit rent. And here’s the kicker — if a restaurant’s lucky, they see 3% profit. That’s 75p. Seventy-five pence. For every £30 bottle you think we’re getting rich on.
Oh, and don’t forget the creeping alcohol duty. The government hikes it, the importers pass it on, and we’re the ones explaining why your favourite Sancerre now costs more than your starter.
This Isn’t Tesco
Because it bears repeating — you’re not in a supermarket. You’re not uncorking this at home in front of the telly with some oven chips. You’re in a space where we’ve laboured over temperature, pairing, service, and atmosphere. You’re here for the whole thing.
This isn’t just juice. It’s theatre.
So Why £30?
Because £30 is what it takes to keep the restaurant machine running. To cover the wine fridge repair, the no-shows from last night, the delivery that turned up after we’d already started lunch.
It’s not a scam. It’s what we need to stay open.
What You’re Really Buying
You’re buying the story behind the bottle. You’re buying our time — the hours spent poring over producer lists, learning acronyms like DOCG and PDO, memorising the Crus of Burgundy and the 1855 Classification.
You’re buying a guarantee — that if you don’t like it, we’ll sort you something else. That it’ll be served at the right temperature, in a clean glass, by someone who cares.
And yes, you could drink a £6 supermarket bottle at home. But here, under this roof, it’s more than wine. It’s a lifeline. A little bit of magic in a stemmed glass.
So yeah, it’s £46.20. And if you knew what went into it — really knew — you might even think it’s cheap.
So next time you’re out for dinner, take a moment to enjoy the little things. Maybe the staff ask what you like and guide you toward something you’ve never tried before. Maybe they keep your glass topped up without needing to be asked. Maybe they save you money by steering you away from the famous label and toward something just as good — maybe better — from a lesser-known vineyard.
Or maybe, it’s as simple as this: when you’ve finished the bottle, we take the dirty glasses, and someone else does the washing up.
I went to a restaurant over the weekend. It has recieved at least one rave review in the national press. I paid £27 for a bottle of Lucido. Bargain, right? Except there was quite a delay in it arriving at the table, and we had to remind FOH that it had been ordered (they were quite obviously understaffed). When it did arrive, the bottle was room temperature. They put it on ice but as is always the case in these circumstances it was only the right temperature by the time the last glass was poured. It was served in the most shittest, cheap tiny wine glasses I think I've ever seen in a restaurant. It would have been better to have used water tumblers. The wine was bland and characterless, nowhere near as good as M&S Found Lucido. Even at £27, where is the value?
Admittedly, this was a relatively rare occurance of a bad experience in a 'rated restaurant' (the food was poor too)but with the rapidly rising cost of dining out, it's difficult to just write it off as one of those things and move on to the next place without it making you feel more cautious about where you spend your money next.
This was a casual lunch for two people in a mid-level pasta restaurant, two courses, a bottle of wine and service would have been well over £100 if they hadn't have compd my main course which was inedible (I didn't ask them to take it off the bill, they just did it which was good of them). I don't think anyone is tying to rip me off, but there comes a point when something just becomes so expensive that it can't possibly deliver value for money. I suppose that point is subjective and partly depends on income, but I'm getting less and less willing to take a punt on a meal out. This is one of two experiences local to me (although neither in Brighton) that have reminded me of eating out 30 years ago when bad service, poorly trained staff, average food and uninteresting wine lists were par for the course, at least outside London. Sometimes it feels like hospitality is going backwards.
Sorry, I think I might have gone off topic a bit. I suppose what I'm saying is that you can explain your business model until you are blue in the face but when your customers pick up your wine list, they are not thinking about how you make your numbers work, they are thinking about their bank balance, and nothing is going to change that.
Good points well made. Totally understand and every other restaurateur is in the same boat. But they, like you, charge service on wine on top of a mark-up that is designed to cover service, training, breakages etc. That doesn't seem quite right. (I know, I know, list prices would have to be even more expensive if you didn't. But still ... )