We have all become only too used to the surging cost of heating our homes, filling up our cars or doing the weekly shop. But there’s one price increase that hurts me more than all of these combined: the cost of a bottle of wine in a restaurant.
Just five years ago, it was rare to find a wine list without at least one bottle under £25; now it’s increasingly common to find one little under £40. We have reached a point where £35 house wine is now normal. Take Maggie Jones in Kensington. I used to eat there regularly in the late 90s and early 00s and recall it being fabulously cheap – a point emphasised by the magnums of house wine on which they’d mark with a pencil how much you had drunk. Often it was quite a lot. When I returned this spring, however, after an almost 20-year absence, the cheapest bottle on their list was £37.
Next month’s biggest London restaurant opening will be Ornella in Dalston, the second offering from The White Lotus actor Theo James and partners. The menu hasn’t been published yet but the wine list for his existing site, Lupa in Highbury, shows that the cheapest bottles are £38. Further research found that both of these – the Ponte Pietra Trebbiano-Garganega white and Saveroni Merlot-Corvina red – are available to buy from Hay Wines, for £10.99. In other words, James is making a markup of at least 345 per cent, more if he gets a wholesale deal on them.
When I lived around the corner from the Ornella site in 1999-2000, the idea of paying £38 for any bottle of wine, let alone house, would have caused incredulity. Yet here we are. But Maggie Jones and Ornella are examples of what is now typical, not exceptional. I’m sure you have your own. And 345 per cent isn’t especially grasping: when a threefold mark-up is considered the norm it only becomes pernicious at 400 per cent or higher.
According to figures from trade body UKHospitality released last month, the cost of the average glass of wine is now nearly 40 per cent higher than it was in 2020. Coincidentally, on a personal level, 2020 was also, for professional reasons, the year when I found myself no longer able to claim restaurant bills on expenses. Suddenly paying for myself from that bitter moment onward brought the cost of the experience of eating out into sharp focus. Adding a further 40 per cent to the drinks bill has made my focus sharper still.
Just five years ago, it was rare to find a wine list without at least one bottle under £25; now it’s increasingly common to find one little under £40
And of course, if you are one of those people who attempts to appear more sophisticated by ordering the second cheapest bottle, then if the house wine is £35, your choice is likely to be at least £37. By the time the establishment has added at least a 10 per cent service charge, you will be paying over £40 for something you know you could likely buy in Tesco for £11.
When I mentioned this to Giles Coren, restaurant critic at the Times, he simply laughed at me. ‘£35 sounds pretty reasonable,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing a lot of places with nothing under £50.’ For context on our relative expectations in this sphere, I refer you again to the differential between those who are paying themselves and those on expenses. Coren referred me to his recent review of South African restaurant Kudu in Marylebone in which he noted that, fancying a Pinotage, he found their cheapest, Southern Right, was £97. And I realised that, when I was in Cape Town a few months back, we were buying the very same bottle there for about £20 – in restaurants. As Coren put it: ‘Most bottles [at Kudu] are in the £100-£300 bracket. Who is buying that stuff?’
Fellow critic Jay Rayner, now with the Financial Times, also recently noted how the discovery that the cheapest bottle on a restaurant list is £35 or £40 ‘makes the whole experience of going to a restaurant feel uncomfortable’. Too right it does, Jay. Even humble Pizza Express has recently crossed the £25 rubicon, abandoning that psychological price point with its house offerings, a Chardonnay or Nero d’Avola, both now £26.75. How long before a rustic red with your American Hot is £35? At the other end of the spectrum, if your chosen restaurant is so hip that its wine list omits pound signs, you could be looking at 42-plus.
Restaurants blame increased costs. There’s more duty on wine as well as the rest of it: food inflation, increases to staff wages and national insurance. But that doesn’t quite explain it. What’s actually happening, I’m told, is that restaurateurs know they will scare away more punters by raising the cost of starters and mains than they will by raising the price of the cheapest wines.
So for the first time in my eating-out life, I’m now looking at wine lists as well as menus before booking, and I shall be boycotting – or perhaps recognising that I can’t afford – those whose house wine is £35 or more, unless someone else is paying. Join me! It’s time for consumers to draw a red line, a red wine line.
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