Posted on 08/21/2019 10:01:49 AM PDT by ptsal
I do like wine. So why pay more than you have to? I get the House Red whenever I go to restaurant and it's just fine. At home, I get deliveries of Splash Wine for about $90 (for a case of 15 bottles) for a net price of $6 a bottle. Rarely disappointed.
No need for paying more, really. Wine is basically fermented grapes. Remember that. Forget about all that fancy talk of terroirs and vintages. Wine is basically wine.
I will narrow it down some. Wines you like the taste of and wines you don’t.
Pear Ripple is wonderful for those picnics in the countryside.
Indeed. I only even know of Cold Duck because it was a holiday tradition in the missus’ family, too.
And yes, in small amounts. We had regular libations too.
I’ve enjoyed $3 dollar bottles more than $15 dollar bottles.
A wine snob took me to a wine tasting many years ago. There are of course plenty of different tasting wines. Some smelled like an old sock but tasted nice. Some smell nice and taste horrible.
Most restaurants that serve a house wine have probably spent a bit of time and experimentation in choosing the least offensive or most well accepted wine that costs them very little. And of course fancier places pour from premium bottles and call it the house wine.
A friend of mine (one of the guys we used to have those dinner parties I wrote about above) owns a couple of restaurants. He was very clever in opening his first place though. Got a great location in a trendy area (and somehow got a great lease rate but spent a fortune in building it out). They serve coffee and danish stuff starting at 5 am, free wifi etc. Around lunch time they serve wine and after 3 they turn off the wifi and focus on selling glasses of wine and small plates of food until after 1 am. The mark-up on some of that stuff is incredible, like, costs him $2-$4 for a bottle and he charges $8-$12 a glass. And up from there of course. Huge selection. So I guess people like wine. No hard liquor. I imagine the markup on coffee and danish is likewise huge. Personally now I hate spending money on wine in a restaurant knowing their margins are so massive.
Occasionally I do pay for a bottle of wine in a restaurant and the bottles they charge $60 for can be gotten at the local liquor store for around $15. I'm sure the restaurants pay less than the $15.
In California, when you see those shiny tanker trucks from Cherokee Trucking going in both directions, it does make you think about the amount wine hauled from point A to point B and from point C to both points A and B. You get the idea. Wine is mostly a bunch of hooey from the marketing department. There are no little red-nosed winemakers. Those days are gone.
Yup. I know a restaurant where if you bring your own bottle and they have that same vintage on their list they charge a corkage fee equal to their list price.
But I also know a great place with great food that has no liquor license - but plenty of wine screws on the tables for those of us who want to bring our own. I like that place better :-)
Which department contributes the most to the restaurant’s bottom-line?
Well, it is alcohol sales.
Cheaper (and, smaller carbon foot print!) to ship a tanker full of a wine to local bottlers for local distribution than to ship all that glass in empty and out full of wine from the vintner’s location.
Of course the small producers do it their own way. I imagine it’s like the man said, to become a millionaire in the wine business start with 2 million.
Have you tried El Gato Negro? It tastes like it’s been through a gato negro.
The standard restaurant markup for a bottle is 100-200%. Lower than 100% is a rare bargain; more than 200% is gouging.
Some places which are trying to be 'consumer friendly' mark up at twice wholesale, which looks like a 33.33% mark up over retail.
In New York, you sometimes see three times retail, which is really gouging!
Sensitivity to differences in wines differs widely. Partly, I think it's a matter of genetics, partly a matter of training and experience. If you have no reference points it's hard to make comparisons. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that he can't tell a $40 wine from a $6 wine, just as I accept that some people have perfect pitch and others can't tell one tune from another. General Grant was (in)famous for having said (listening to a band) the tunes all sounded like Yankee Doodle to him. I do think that most people, who want to, can improve their palates and can learn to differentiate among wines on a quality basis, if not a price basis - I'd be the first to agree that while price is a general guide to quality, it's not a reliable guide, and there is a whole lot of wine sold for premium prices that is probably worse than many sound commercial wines (like your Gallo Cabernet - a poor replacement for the blend that was Hearty Burgundy back in the day) costing a half as much or less.
I have an eight word theory of wine tasting:
Pull Lots of Corks
Remember What You Taste
The last four words are important to figuring out what you like and being able to replicate it other than by looking at the label. Everyone has some sort of taste memory, but few people make a point of training it. (just as few people train their memories much at all, these days). Your taste memory includes '70 La Mission, which is a good wine in a very fine year - an excellent benchmark. My benchmarks are different for Cabernet, though several 1970 Bordeaux and California Cabs are among them. And, I'm lucky enough to have tasted many of these wines through their life cycles.
It has become harder to find daily drinkers - my base point is around $15 minimum these days, though I can sometimes get a case of something I like for ~$10-12. For special occasions, for dinner parties, and even for a 'special' dinner at home, I go to my cellar, where I have wines I bought young, and have kept until maturity (or I lose my patience). I rarely drink Cabernet under the age of 10, prefer my Zin between 8-15, and other wines at varying ages. YMMV.
Restaurants typically pay wholesale, often less if they buy on discounts (post off). In most states the ‘suggested retail’ price is 150% of wholesale. In some states, there are still legal minimums at retail (usually 10% under suggested retail), but it varies among the 50 states....
I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. Loved Iron City beer. The only wine I ever tried that I could stomach more than a sip of was Gewurtztraminer. It tastes enough like grape juice that I could drink it - but why would I when there was Iron City? Everything else I ever tried (which wasn’t that much to be honest, and never the “good” stuff) tasted like rurnt grape juice.
I don’t drink any more, so no plans to upgrade my knowledge of wines.
I have pulled a few corks in my time, and have learned that I consistently receive greatest pleasure and value from the southern Rhone valley: cotes du Rhone, Chateauneuf, and Gigondas go very well with Louisiana food. I’ll drink a GSM from Australia also and have enjoyed some immensely. But these are $15-$75 bottles, and that’s not my everyday price point. Thus my plea for plonk.
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