in venice, if you bring your own 1.5L bottle to the enoteca, they will fill it for 2€ if they don't know you, and 1€ if the do. serious markup, but i would not expect them to be selling a half L for under a euro, either. comes in little used barrels (maybe 40-50L)from the vineyards.

I was staying at the O'Hare Rennaissance last night, and found the aforementioned $7 bottle of wine (Red Diamond Merlot) for $11 a glass, or $43 for a bottle.

That's a good example. Even if there are better "deals" on the menu, say they had a $20 bottle for $55, I'm personally reluctant to pay that kind of money and would probably rather splurge on a $40 bottle to sip at home to accompany Mrs. Fredd's proven fine cooking.

One exception has been tasting menus at Gramercy Tavern and Alan Wong's HNL. At Alan Wong's a couple of years ago we paid a premium to include the wines selected - I'm sure at great profit to them - to accompany each course but it was a superb experience. We were drinking wines by the glass chosen to complement the food, including at least one, a not-dry white, we'd ordinarily avoid and saying, aha, this is what matching the wine with the food is all about. ^

A $43 bottle of Red Diamond isn't going to be quite as memorable, is it?

The upsell would offend me.

Interesting point about the second cheapest bottle. I will go ahead and order the cheapest bottle from now on.

Thanks for that reminder. ^ I've also read it somewhere and dug out a 2009 WSJ article, 10 Ways to Save Money Ordering (wine).

3. Bypass the second-cheapest wine on the list. Restaurateurs know that diners don't want to appear cheap by ordering the least expensive wine on the list, so they'll hose you for ordering the second-cheapest. The least expensive is actually a pretty good deal at many places.

The other 9 suggestions are also worth reading IMO.

Dorothy and John were always worth reading and I savored their columns over the fifteen or twenty or so years they wrote them for the WSJ. I miss them dearly.

I don't necessarily care about wine pricing (within reason), but I do think less of restaurant that has nothing but a bunch of mass market wine on their menu. Demonstrate some originality.