The great wine rip-off

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The price of champagnes and wines can often treble from the shop to the restaurant table

We've all heard the one about the fellow who goes to France and drinks the local plonk at £2 a bottle only to find the same wine being served in his local restaurant at £18 plus. Fantasy? Sadly not.

London restaurateurs may complain about the congestion charge, the overheads and the lack of punters, but is it any wonder when wine can double and even treble the price of lunch or dinner in the capital?

With the guidance of Martin Lam, the proprietor of Ransome's Dock restaurant in Battersea, and John Konig, an independent wine merchant who supplies the restaurant trade, I decided to establish just how much mark-up we are being charged for wine in London's restaurants.

For a really special lunch or dinner you might want to go to Gordon Ramsay at Claridges. If you do, don't chose number 592 on the wine list, a light-drinking Fleurie that is on the menu at £29 a bottle. Before any trade discount but including VAT, the wine cost Gordon £8.22 a bottle. That's a mark-up of 350 per cent, no less.

Perhaps, wanting to be a little less grand, you could visit another Ramsay establishment, the Boxwood Café in Knightsbridge. As the food costs less, you could be tempted to push the boat out with the wine and order a bottle of the Nuits St Georges 2000 at £85 a bottle. But after being told that the restaurant has marked up the bottle by 500 per cent, you might think again.

That same bottle of wine at Ransome's Dock costs £50, a difference of £35. The overheads in Knightsbridge might be a bit more, but surely not enough to warrant such profit margins. However, when you hear that the wholesale price is just £18.50 a bottle, then you realise it is we paying customers who end up out of pocket.

"Some of the mark-ups I see are horrendous," says Konig. "I sold some delicious French wine to a restaurateur recently at £8 per bottle. He turned to me and said, 'Do you think the punters will stand paying £24?'

"Personally I think this is an outrageous mark-up, although it seems to be pretty standard practice in the trade. On the whole, London restaurants charge like a wounded rhino; many of the mark-ups are just a straightforward rip-off."

But it's not just the Ramsay establishments where the wines can multiply in price, as one look at the wine list at many of Sir Terence Conran's restaurants shows. At Quaglinos in St James, for example, a bottle of Muscadet costing just £4.30 wholesale will set you back a hefty £17.50, an increase of more than 400 per cent. And the wholesale price doesn't include any trade discount - something a group as big as Conran Restaurants might well negotiate.

But how about visiting a less pricey Conran establishment like the Almeida in North London? You could order the 2001 Côtes du Roussillon at only £22.50 per bottle. A bargain, you might think, until you realise the very same bottle is available wholesale at £4.30.

And don't forget to factor in the 12.5 per cent service that is added to nearly all restaurant bills as a matter of routine. "There are other tricks too," warns Lam. "A lot of wine lists at restaurants say in the small print, 'Should the listed vintage be unavailable, an alternative will be offered'. It is well worth looking out for this phrase."

Take, for example, the huge discrepancy in pricing of the Cos d'Estournel, a French claret. The 2000 vintage costs £580 a case before duty and VAT, but the same wine produced in 2001 will cost £390 a case, and the 1993 vintage, which many punters might perceive to be better because it is older, costs just £285 a case. This is a price difference of more than 100 per cent for a wine many people might think is exactly the same.

"There is a world of difference between the different years and you should keep an eye on the vintage. This technique for ripping off the customer is really very sly indeed, but it goes on all the time," says Lam.

However, not all of the mark-ups on wine are too extreme. "If we buy a Bordeaux at £12 we will sell it at £30 (a mark-up of 250 per cent)," says Eric Garnier, joint owner and wine buyer at award-winning restaurant Racine.

"The costs of running a restaurant are very high. We pay our staff well and there is the cost of food and wine as well as services like electricity, rates and insurance."

So, where is the best value to be had? It's at your local Pizza Express. And no, I don't mean the bilge water that the pizza chain serves up which masquerades as good Chianti or Valpolicella. I mean the Mercier champagne. At £28.90 a bottle, it's the best value in town - but even then the Pizza Express margin is over 100 per cent.

 

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