i first heard of a corkage fee this summer and it weirded me the heck out. what do you mean people bring their own bottle to restaurants? isn’t the point of those kinds of places that they select a wine that goes well with the food?
not that i can even drink wine but still…
If you think about it, there are hundreds of thousands of combinations of wine labels and vintages from thousands of producers. Some people who collect the wine and store it at home will want to enjoy the wine they have with a professionally prepared meal, and will bring that wine to a restaurant, and enjoy the entire service aspect of it (pouring into nice glasses, etc.).
It doesn’t make much sense for ordinary bottles of wine. So the people who do this usually bring special, hard to find, significantly aged, or sentimental bottles. And because the restaurant still provides the service of opening and pouring the wine into nice glasses that they’ll clean, there’s usually a per bottle charge added to the bill.
So it’s not super common, just also not super rare, either.
but why would you bring that kind of wine to an edinburgh curry house (which is where i first saw it mentioned)
It’s just a really easy thing for restaurants to do. Even if it’s not listed many will do this.
I have only ever encountered it in the context of wine though. I wonder what would have if I brought a bottle of whiskey.
Maybe the wine at the curry house was shit and they knew it so they brought their own.
If you were a wino and that was your favorite restaurant, why wouldn’t you?
not that i can even drink wine
Because of your drinking problem?
no because the sulphides combine with my medication to give me turbo-hangovers after a quarter of a glass.
but the airplane explanation is funnier so yeah, it’s that
So is it only wine that messes you up? It’d be interesting to know if you get any negative reactions from Breznak for example next time you’re at Systembolaget (if you even drink, I dunno)
No one ever believes me; they genuinely seem to think I get hungover even if I drink just a single beer. Then I can drink them under the table with any kind of spirits, and have no hangover the next day.
Then you might bring your own sulphide free wine and pay the corkage fee.
I also thought that I was really intolerant of sulfites, as most red wine gives me a headache directly, but it doesn’t seem to be just that…
One way I noticed this was that my boss’s favorite beer is Breznak, and so when he gave me a can as my first drink after-work, I got immediately headached, despite that it should have pretty low levels of sulfites. And then I made the connection a couple weeks later when the same thing happened. So the third time he wanted to hang after work, I took some macro lagers with me (Norrlands Guld), and I drank several without problems.
I can even drink a ton of vodka and not have a headache the next day… but if you give me a half glass of red wine or many different kinds of beer, I immediately get the worst headaches. I wish I knew why.
i feel like that’s more of an allergy thing than a preference thing though.
There’s a spray/drops you can use to remove sulfides in wine
the second reason i don’t drink wine is that it tastes like ass
I wish ass tasted like wine
Things that make you sick do tend to be remembered poorly.
Some municipalities do not grant liquor licenses to restaurants so BYOB is the loophole.
Sometimes people will bring a bottle from a particular year (year they got married on a big anniversary date) or will have some other particular sentimental reasoning for this, so it’s not very often.
sure but if it doesn’t happen very often there’s no real reason to charge for it?
maybe it’s differing alcohol cultures, idk. according to some bullshit map i saw years ago i live in the “vodka belt”, so maybe i’m too drunk off of ambient fumes to get it.
Here’s a non-wine related thing often charged by restaurants: a cake-cutting fee. The restaurant offers desserts which you won’t be buying, and yet they are supplying you with plates and forks, and they will keep your cake safe in the kitchen until dessert, bring it out to be admired with maybe candles and a song, or a toast to the happy couple, then they’ll cut and plate and pass the slices, and afterwards they’ll wash the dishes. So they charge a fee to pay for the people and supplies.
We had a birthday party at a sushi train restaurant and brought a rainbow cake. We’d agreed to pay $20 or something over the total of all the sushi everyone ate. They turned down the lights and sent out the cake as individual slices on individual plates each with a lit candle flickering on it, and the teenagers loved it, which is pretty hard to do because teenagers.
Yes but the up-charge on wine is absolutely obscene and can frequently be more than what they earn on the food. Additionally, the places that can get away with this are the kind of places where arguing about what would be a relatively small charge on the bill would be so incredibly awkward that you wouldn’t dare.
So it’s extortion basically, but fancy.
so the reason i haven’t seen it is probably the alcohol tax that adds 50€/liter of pure ethanol to every beverage. it’s just not useful here.
wait.
as in, every beverage has 50£ worth of pure ethanol added to it? if so… no wonder Slavs are always depicted as drunk off their asses LOL
or is it a 50£ per litre of pure ethanol on each pallet of alcoholic beverages (eg… 2l of pure ethanol adds 100£ of tax to the pallet price)?
a 10% ABV half-litre bottle will have 2.5€ in tax added to its price for the ethanol content.
If there was no charge then everyone would bring their own, and they would have to start charging more for the food to make up for the loss.
What loss? They can lose something that they didn’t had in the first place.
Like it or not, alcohol sales subsidize their income. The markup is substantial.
And that still doesn’t justifies the literal extortion of their clients.
Yes it does?
not if they just say no.
Where I live bring your own places would be cheap end restaurants not ones that pair the right wine with food.
Even high end restaurants stock mostly swill for profit margins. To find a restaurant with good wine is to find a unicorn. In the US, anyway
Many cigar lounges will do the same if you want to smoke cigars you got elsewhere at their lounge.
that’s even weirder, because as far as i understand it, the things that pair well with cigars are in general not things you need to have at specific places.
It’s not really about the pairing, if these places allow liquor they usually have a nice selection or is byob. Many cigar shops only carry certain brands, and many cigars aren’t meant to be smoked when you buy them, but to be aged.
man the rest of the world really needs to adopt kalsarikännit already
I mean I do that all the time, but I don’t want to smoke in my house, and it’s too cold to do outside 1/3 or more of the year.
I’ve been to some restaurants where they don’t charge a corkage fee as long as they don’t sell the wine you bring.
Do they charge corkage on wine they do sell you?
Basically yes, in the form of a markup on the bottle’s price.
To the baby: “Excellent vintage. You’ll want to make sure those nips aerate before enjoying so they are fully erect.”
PSA: Don’t let mother’s milk turn vintage
Shaken, not stirred
