Corkage

I’ve been trying to be better about taking my own wine out to restaurants and just paying corkage.  Corkage is probably one of the best deals in the restaurant business, although it certainly doesn’t seem like it.   Corkage is the fee you pay the restaurant to open your own bottle of wine.  

“So let me see if I have this straight”, you’re thinking, “you bring in your own bottle of wine and then pay them to let you drink it?”

“Exactly!”

If I were to estimate how much money I could save per year by always paying corkage, as opposed to buying wine at the restaurant, I would guess it would be around $1500.   I have a taste for good wine and I eat out a lot.  

Corkage fees are usually in the $15 - $25 range.   I go to “Morton’s” for steak several times a year and they charge $30.   I took a magnum (double sized bottle) of Archery Summit Renegade Ridge Pinot Noir to a restaurant called “Le Pigeon” and they charged me $50.    The rationale for that is that it’s really two bottles and they charged me $25 for each of them.   It’s a lot of money.   Drinking wine in restaurants is just never really very cheap.

Now, let’s consider the alternative.   You can buy wine from the restaurant.   Most of the establishments where I eat, particularly for nice meals, have good wine lists.   I never have trouble finding something on the list that I will enjoy.   The problem is the restaurant’s mark up.   About the lowest markup I’ve ever seen is around 75%.   The standard is 100%.  At some restaurants, “Morton’s” for example, it’s 130%.   The average bottle of wine that I would drink at a restaurant retails for around $50.   This means that I’m going to pay between $87.50 and $115.   With corkage, that would be between $65 and $80.   So you see, it’s really a no brainer.

I went out to dinner on Saturday night with a large group.   We brought all of our own wine.  I’m guessing that we probably went through 12 bottles or so.   The corkage there was $15, so there was somewhere around $180 in “opening” fees.   That’s a lot of money.    If the average price per bottle was $25 though, then we paid $480 total for wine and fees.   It would have been $600 to buy the wine at the restaurant.   This means that we saved $120.   That’s a good deal.    It’s made even better by the fact that our gracious hostess picked up the entire tab.   I need to talk to her about that.