How do restaurants get away with $20 for corkage?
How do restaurants get away with charging $20 or more for corkage? I don't mind paying a token fee - say $2.50 or $5 - but these charges seem extortionate.
The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights comprises 30 separate articles, not one of which mentions the right to bring your own booze to a restaurant. In Australia, our eccentric liquor licensing history has left some of us prone to forgetting it's a privilege. Although laws vary from state to state, extending that privilege to customers is generally at the restaurateur's discretion - as is the price.
The maths behind corkage fees is complicated by several variables, but three of the most important are what it actually costs the restaurant to pour the wine you brought yourself, the amount needed to compensate for loss of profit from a bottle you would otherwise have bought from them, and how hard they want you to think about whether you're really going to save a buck when you BYO.
Cost is an argument that causes many a BYO customer to froth at the mouth: ''What cost? It's not like they actually make the wine. They don't even have to use a corkscrew on screw caps.'' Well, no. But they open the doors each night, which means paying rent and power and other costs. They provide glasses and people to clear and wash them. If they're Duralex tumblers, it's reasonable to expect corkage on the low side, but if they're Riedel stems, they'll be factoring in breakages, big-time.
Compensating for loss of profit? It's expensive to run a long, ambitious wine list. The longer the list, the more stock the restaurant holds and the more slowly it moves. A proper sommelier costs much more per hour than the average plate-carrier at the local cheap-n-cheerful. If customers aren't buying from that list, they're not contributing to any of this.
And, yes, there's the disincentive factor. Restaurants that aren't counting on wine profits to keep the bottom line in the black might not care what wine you bring. But at the upper end of the market, many a restaurateur has found - when agreeing to make an exception to a ''no BYO'' rule - that the customer who insisted on bringing a ''special'' wine turns up with freshly bought mass-market plonk. These customers are the ones you can thank, or blame, for the introduction of higher corkage charges designed to ensure that unless you really do plan to bring that treasured bottle of Grange from the year of your birth, you may as well settle for paying the mark-ups on the restaurant's own list.