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ORIGINAL: dsGris

I do not drink wine in restaurants if I can help it, especially after spending a month in Spain where 15e gets a damn good bottle!

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ORIGINAL: KPB

Less-demanded but good wines are probably marked up something like 30-50% from winery door to the consumer.

For high quality European wines imported to the US, by and large you'll see a markup of nearly 100% compared to what you would pay at the door of the winery. The most famous wines sometimes get into a bit of a tug of war with their importers around this questions: the winery obviously wants more of the end-user price, while the importer wants to mark up by 50% and then everyone in the "feeding chain" wants a further 10%: the importer probably distributes to a state-level wholesaler, who in turn sells the wine to your retail store. So you can see something like (X*1.5)*1.1*1.1, which is already an 80% markup (and this assumes the latter two are content with 10% profits). So sometimes more of the money reaches the winery, sometimes less. The saddest are high-end wines like Pegau da Capo, which are often somewhat reasonably priced at the door of the winery, but might be marked up by 150% or 200% by the time you get a chance to buy them...

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ORIGINAL: musedir

At a resturant tonight in Louisville where plonk was 2.5x and decent swill 3+x... Really pissed me off. Drank a Guinness instead.

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ORIGINAL: cp5i6x

i will add, that there are very very few small businesss in the US who will only live on a measley 10% margin, the ones that do are probably out of business or soon will be.

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ORIGINAL: champagneinhand

quote:

ORIGINAL: KPB

Less-demanded but good wines are probably marked up something like 30-50% from winery door to the consumer.

For high quality European wines imported to the US, by and large you'll see a markup of nearly 100% compared to what you would pay at the door of the winery. The most famous wines sometimes get into a bit of a tug of war with their importers around this questions: the winery obviously wants more of the end-user price, while the importer wants to mark up by 50% and then everyone in the "feeding chain" wants a further 10%: the importer probably distributes to a state-level wholesaler, who in turn sells the wine to your retail store. So you can see something like (X*1.5)*1.1*1.1, which is already an 80% markup (and this assumes the latter two are content with 10% profits). So sometimes more of the money reaches the winery, sometimes less. The saddest are high-end wines like Pegau da Capo, which are often somewhat reasonably priced at the door of the winery, but might be marked up by 150% or 200% by the time you get a chance to buy them...

Yep and some American specialty shops understand supply and demand way too much and mark up certain bottles hundreds of dollars over what they sell for in Europe, particularly Alsace, though I have seen others that travel from Spain to get a wine in Germany, when Riesling and TBA is involved.

But I don't want to come between a buyer and their grail wine. Some really low priced wines, that may or may not be plonk get slashed by distributors and stores by them for pennies on the dollar. I wouldn't trust provenance but thats me.

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ORIGINAL: jmcmchi

To add to the murk of this question....I found two wines today in the provincial (state) liquor store in BC, where excise tax markup is 125%, that are cheaper than the quoted retail price in the US where excise taxes are ?....

One 2008 Washington - where you could argue that FX movements since 2010 account for the relative value in CAD - but one current release Aussie riesling which has no relative benefit from FX movements