Originally Posted by
coztoadfish
Just following your some comments. Is the better value on the premium wines to order something that is ordinarily fairly expensive retail as opposed to mid-price retail? (I understand expensive is very relative term ). The reason I ask this is that years ago United Club charged me like $15 for a glass of a red that I later realized was like $20/bottle retail. Just irritated me that I could drink house red that is maybe a little under $2/glass retail (by the bottle) for free but if I wanted to drink wine that was like $4/glass (by the bottle) I would need to pay $15 to United Club or whatever it was. The lousy relative value proposition just irritated the economist in me.
It kind of sounds like you guys are drinking $10/glass retail (by the bottle) and paying United Club $15 or $20/glass. Is that the case? That percentage markup is much more palatable to me than paying a full (200%+) restaurant markup price for a so-so wine at a club where I have to pay to be member (and I have used for 25 years so I remember when we weren’t packed in like sardines, but that’s another story )
P.S.
I understand true wine connoisseurs probably wouldn’t drink a house red even if you paid them $20/glass to drink it , but I’m not in that camp 😀
As a general principle, the markup is lower on higher priced items. When ordering an entree at a restaurant, the markup on the chicken is far higher than that on the beef. Same for the wines at a restaurant. If you pick the lowest nominally priced one, you might be paying a 300%-400% markup from wholesale. If you pick a higher priced one, it might be down to 200%, or occasionally even below. Of course, there are other factors that come into play, such as what you actually want to eat and drink, or your budget for the meal, but on the question of markup this is how it generally works.