Pricing
Guests already know your markup. Price as if they do.
Diners compare restaurant wine prices with retail at the table. Stop putting the fattest markup on the most googled labels. UK rooms, pounds.
Written by Marco Azzari on
An expensive bottle on a list feels like a commitment. Before the pour is finished, someone at the table can see what the same label costs at the supermarket or the local merchant. If your fattest multiplier sits on the most famous names, you are asking the guest to pay a tax for recognition. Many will not. They will take the second-cheapest wine, or they will take nothing, and you will say demand is dead.
Matching shop prices is the wrong target. A room has glassware, service, breakage, rent, business rates, and 20% VAT. The guest knows that too, roughly. What they punish is a multiplier that looks like contempt.
Famous names are a lousy place to hide margin
The wines people can type into a phone are the wines that get typed. Unknown bottles with a fair price and a sayable line are harder to "catch." That is not a licence to gouge the unknown either. It is a reason to stop using Sancerre as a piggy bank.
Sommeliers feel this as an attack on the cellar's pride. The pride can stay. Put the googled labels at a multiplier you can sit next to. Make cash margin on glasses, on house, on wines the shopper cannot price in two seconds, on pairing that belongs to this kitchen.
"People drink less" is sometimes "people refuse this page"
The bottle for the table is weaker than it was in a lot of UK rooms. Health, money, age mix, the low-and-no shelf. All real. None of that requires a list that looks like a dare.
If the only step between a £26 house and a £95 label is empty air, the guest has no path. Psychology and a price ladder are design. This page is the pricing manners: do not put the insult on the wine they can audit.
What to do on Monday
Pull the ten names most likely to be searched. Check a real UK retail range (supermarkets, independent merchants), not a fantasy. If your selling price makes you wince, the guest already winced. Rebuild those ten with true cost and a multiplier you can say out loud to a regular. Leave the rest of the list alone until those ten do not embarrass you.
English and Welsh bottles from smaller producers can help here, not as patriotism, as a set the guest cannot price from a Bordeaux memory. When English and Welsh wine earns its place.
About the author
Marco Azzari
Founder of Wine CFO · Wine List Engineer for UK restaurants
I help restaurants, hotels and bars across the UK earn more from the wine they already sell. I price lists wine by wine, cost by-the-glass programmes on their real yield, rebuild selections around the food menu, and rewrite lines so guests understand what they're ordering. Every Wine Profit Checkup goes across my desk personally.
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