Pricing
Guests already know your markup. Price as if they do.
Diners compare restaurant wine prices with retail at the table. Stop putting the fattest markup on the most googled labels. Italian rooms, euros.
Written by Marco Azzari on
An expensive bottle on a list feels like a commitment. Before the pour is finished, someone at the table can see what the same label costs in an enoteca or an online shop. If your fattest ricarico sits on the most famous names, you are asking the guest to pay a tax for recognition. Many will not. They will take the second-cheapest wine, or they will take nothing, and you will say demand is dead.
Matching shop prices is the wrong target. A room has glassware, service, breakage, rent, and 10% IVA. The guest knows that too, roughly. What they punish is a ricarico that looks like contempt.
Famous names are a lousy place to hide margin
The wines people can type into a phone are the wines that get typed. Unknown bottles with a fair price and a sayable line are harder to "catch." That is not a licence to gouge the unknown either. It is a reason to stop using Brunello as a piggy bank.
Sommeliers feel this as an attack on the cellar's pride. The pride can stay. Put the googled labels at a ricarico you can sit next to. Make contribution on glasses, on house, on wines the shopper cannot price in two seconds, on pairing that belongs to this kitchen.
"People drink less" is sometimes "people refuse this page"
Bottle-for-the-table is weaker than it was in a lot of European rooms. Health, money, age mix, the drink-driving limit. All real. None of that requires a list that looks like a dare.
If the only step between a €20 house and a €110 Barolo is empty air, the guest has no path. Psychology and a price ladder are design. This page is the pricing manners: do not put the insult on the wine they can audit.
What to do on Monday
Pull the ten names most likely to be searched. Check an Italian retail range (enoteca, online shop, the supermarket shelf where the label lives), not a fantasy. If your selling price makes you wince, the guest already winced. Rebuild those ten with true cost and a ricarico you can say out loud to a regular. Leave the rest of the list alone until those ten do not embarrass you.
Small regional producers can help here, not as campanilismo, as a set the guest cannot price from a Tignanello memory. When regional wine earns its place.
About the author
Marco Azzari
Founder of Wine CFO · Wine List Engineer for restaurants in Italy
I help restaurants, hotels and bars in Italy earn more from the wine they already sell. I price lists wine by wine, cost by-the-glass programmes on their real yield, rebuild selections around the food menu, and rewrite lines so guests understand what they're ordering. Every Wine Profit Checkup goes across my desk personally.
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