Small Bite 003: The Second-Cheapest Bottle on the Menu
Small Bite 003: The Second-Cheapest Bottle on the Menu
On value, mark-ups, and trying to not look cheap.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to Small Bites. What I’m not entirely sure what Small Bites will entail, it will begin as a place to ruminate on something that may not be fully-fledged out and/or something that doesn’t command a full 1,000 words dedicated to it. A place to inspire some conversation in the comments. Will it remain that? Perhaps. Could the name change at any given moment? Again, that’s a possibility.
I was 19 years old. Why anyone thought it would be a good idea for me to describe the wine list to any paying customers? Well, that’s beyond me. Frankly, I just began to make things up when I started getting peppered with questions about wines by the glass.
“This one’s a bit more dry than this one if that’s what you’re interested in.”
“Honestly, for the price, I’d go with this glass right here.”
“Frankly, I haven’t tried that one but this chablis is incredible.”
I knew nothing about wine which isn’t often what you look for in a waiter. I didn’t know what chablis even was. And I still don’t have an impressive enough palate to differentiate which wine is more dry than the others. As much as I want to discuss the merits of orange wine at the next group dinner, I’ve simply given up the idea of becoming an armchair sommelier at this point. The good thing, however, is that I do know how to pronounce “sommelier” correctly.
Now that my years of being a waiter are behind me, I have the pleasure of being on the receiving end of those wines by the glass. But given how commonplace it is to cork the bottle and bring it home with you, going with a bottle has been a natural decision more times than not.
Late last week, I posted the following on the Sunday Scaries Instagram page:
Nevermind the 4.3 million people who watched it — I’m more interested in the comments. Namely any comments calling out the restaurant industry at-large for having a network-wide scheme to screw you out of a few dollars when you order the second-cheapest bottle on the menu. If you’re confused, here’s an example:
A restaurant owner once told me that the 2nd least expensive wine is usually worse/cheaper than the first bc they know more people buy it.
Because this caption style is a recurring one on the page, I see comments in this vein all the time. Truthfully, they seem fair. Or, they did, at least, until I started to really think about it.
While I know this is something that could occur on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis, I had to do some light Googling to see if this was actually the case. After all, I am extremely guilty of this sort of behavior when ordering a bottle at a restaurant.
Here’s what my research yielded from Food & Wine:
A couple of economists had a sneaking suspicion this theory wouldn't hold water—writing that "as far as we know the claim has never been investigated empirically"—so they actually did the research. The results. found in a working paper recently published by the American Association of Wine Economists, came out exactly as they hypothesized: No, the second cheapest bottle of wine is not the biggest rip-off. In fact, the value tends to be the worst at the middle of a list.
They investigated 235 London-based restaurants, and over 6,335 bottles of wine on their respective wine lists. The results?
After crunching the numbers, the paper concluded, "The mark-up on the second-cheapest wine is below that on the immediately succeeding wines. A further finding is that absolute mark-ups increase in rank whilst percentage mark-ups peak on mid-range wines." In fact, the percentage markup tended to jump the most at the third bottle of wine, going from an under 280-percent markup on the first two bottles to an over 300-percent markup starting at the third bottle. And it didn't really start coming back down again until the 11th bottle.
The lesson here? You either have two moves when ordering a bottle: order the cheapest bottles on the menu or absolutely splash on a 1955 Giacomo Conterno ‘Monfortino’ Riserva for $4,000 since the mark-up probably begins to come back down at that point.
Just don’t hit me with a Venmo after that, please.