by the glass

[Randy Caparoso]

Hello, folks. I've been a Wine Board registeree for exactly 30 minutes, and so I'm entering the fray late. As a corporate partner/restaurateur (plus over 25 years in the business) I buy wines for 8 restaurants ranging from Hawaii to New York. I'd be happy to share some of our first hand experiences touching upon the issue of markups and wines by the glass. For starters, my basic comments would be considered "stock." For instance: we basically markup up wine like food. Some foods -- like pizza and pasta -- are extremely low cost; translated into beverage language, you could say that most restaurants markup pizza and pasta as much as 5 to 10 times. Other foods are notoriously high in cost; like prime beef, which generally is sold for barely 2 times. Wine is no different in that today's restaurants are marking up anywhere from to 1.5 to 5 times, but between 2 and 3 on the average -- the higher cost items (re closer to 2 times) usually being the priciest (like, say Dom and Opus), and the lowest cost items (re 3 to 5 times) being the least expensive (i.e. "house" wines like Napa Ridge and White Zin). Of course, we talk about these things in terms of percentage. Generally speaking, healthy, profitable restaurants finish their months with averages of 26% to 32% (i.e. 26 to 32 cents to the dollar) costs for food, and 32% to 38% for wine. Those that don't generally don't stay in business very long. In other words, it's just a fact of life that restaurateurs just can't markup wines like retailers because they really can't scale down their product (like cutting back on portions, decor and service staff) in order to make up for high costs. In fact, consumers are still most attracted to the fanciest, most service oriented restaurants with the big wine lists, temperature controlled cellars, commissioned sommeliers, etc. Hence, the neverending issue of high restaurant markups. It may not seem fair, but it's more like "law of the jungle" than anything else. Either you do things with class and mark stuff up just enough to profit from it, or get drummed out of your own town by your own guests, whether they are big spending wine drinkers or not! Anyhow, that's my basic perspective. The nice thing about many wine professionals in the restaurant industry, of course, is that we really are nice people who have made it their life's work to turn people on to the best and best priced wines possible; and we serve it with food because that's how we believe wine is best served. Some are better than others, but virtually none of us are in it to gauge our own guests in order to pay for our Caribbean vacations. In fact, few of us take even take real vacations!