I know these words individually but not in the sequence as presented here
Most very fancy restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, but they still need to make money, so they charge you a fee to remove the cork and pour it for you.
Ahh, makes sense. It seems I’m too poor to be acquainted with these customs
Basically, he’s joking about charging a fee for preparing the beverage she brought 😁
What is “corkage fee”?
Its something restaurants charge when you bring your own booze. Often times when something like a wedding rents out a whole restaurant and wants to bring their own stuff, the restaurant charges a corkage fee.
Most charge an exorbitant fee to incentivize getting the booze from them and it leads to situations, where a party pays 30€ to serve a 8€ bottle of rum.
It’s when restaurants or wine tastings let you bring your own wine but open it for you and charge for that
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…
I’ve only seen it in practice when someone is throwing a large party and wants to bring their own cheaper wine. It can even be the exact same wine.
Paying the full restaurant markup on the wine can be excessive if you hold a wedding for 70 people and if you can find it much cheaper from tax free or bulk purchase. It would still make sense to pay the corkage fee then.
Ayyyy I do this a lot if I don’t know the place. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what I like and have a collection to match my preferences.
If they have the styles and regions I like I order off menu, if not I got mine. $30 corkage is reasonable for a decent restaurant, I know a dive bar that does $10 and a bunch of us go there for snacks and to bust out bottles to share.
All good bottles should be shared.
So if I’m following you correctly, you bring a bottle to a restaurant and pay them to pull the cork and I guess give you glasses?
It’s a fee for them to serve the drinks you supplied on their premises. You don’t get to use their premises and wait staff for free just because you supplied the drinks.
You are already paying for the food, aren’t you?
So it isn’t free.
And you don’t need wait staff to open your own bottle either.
You know there are costs associated with serving alcohol in an establishment right?
Also, a lot of bars and restaurants make nearly zero margin on their food. They stay afloat with the sale of alcohol.
I know people that have really nice wine glasses and they bring their own to a restaurant.
So I guess it’s possible that some people bring their own wine and glass.
Going to the restaurant you pay the most for the place simply existing in time, space and rent.
And chill and decant if they’re fancy.
Protip, boxed wine doesn’t have a cork, so they can’t charge you for de-corking it.
The absolute BALLS you need to go into a place that likely has a dress code and slam a box of wine on the table when they ask what you’d like to drink.
I almost want to do it now.
Not even use a glass, just hoist the removed up above my head and drink right from the spout.
No need to be uncivilized. Bring your finest solo cups.
I’m in, there’s some under rated box wines out there.
That’s where the little known “goon bag” fee comes in.
Not always, it’s just a fee for brining your own wine.
Correct
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You ok? That got to a ten really fast.
13 and angry mommy and daddy don’t love you? Or just an angry internet loser?
I’m guessing someone who was failed by the American Healthcare System by being prescribed mood stabilizers they cant afford.
You’re a kinder soul than I lol
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I personally wouldn’t do it, but you seem unfamiliar with the concept of letting people enjoy things they like. And the concept of friends, too, judging by that last comment.
Seriously… wishing death on a person for such a trivial thing is absolutely psychotic. Go seek help.
I, struggling to see why your offended by this
When you buy a bottle at a restaurant there’s usually a 200% markup on the bottle anyway. I’m not bringing a $15 bottle in these cases, so i’m usually saving money.
Seek therapy.
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)
Does that curry house have an alcohol licence? Because some don’t (either for religious reasons or cost, I’m not sure), but they’re still providing glasses that will need to be washed.
Generally this is done for cost reasons by the customer. Wine in restaurants is expensive, corkage doesn’t make up the difference, so people looking to save some money will bring their own, pay the fee and still come out on top. Fancy restaurants with sommeliers don’t advertise this (idk if that means they don’t do it though)
Sometimes you can bring a cheap bottle of wine and even with the corkage fee it ends up being less than the cheapest bottle of wine at the restaurant.
someone said 30€ fee? that’s insanely expensive.
Maybe the wine at the curry house was shit and they knew it so they brought their own.
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.
or one of those plastic jugs of vodka
If you were a wino and that was your favorite restaurant, why wouldn’t you?
idk if i could afford eating at a restaurant if i was a wino
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
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.
Yeah, that sucks, not knowing when you might get an attack. I hope you get that figured out so you know what to avoid.
You may have an intolerance to yeast?
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
Things that make you sick do tend to be remembered poorly.
I wish ass tasted like wine
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.
i have no problem with beer and spirits, but blended drinks and wine hit like a truck. as far as i can tell the common thread seems to be the sulphites.
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.
ok that’s cute
Wait that rules. I’m gonna have my next birthday at a sushi train restaurant. Hell yeahhh
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.
that is… so incredibly -strange-.
was this added to encourage citizens to homebrew their own alchohol, or something? thats about the only reason I could think of…
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.
not if they just say no.
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.
Mate, it’s not extortion because you have the option of not doing it. Look up extortion in a dictionary.
Then if you still think it’s wrong, work out why you actually object to it.
Yes it does?
Some municipalities do not grant liquor licenses to restaurants so BYOB is the loophole.
I do it because my partner and I don’t drink but we still like to feel fancy and have bubbly when we go out for anniversaries and whatnot. Especially in a group setting, I’m happy to pay the fee to not have people bring attention to us not drinking by having our own NA bubbly.
the restaurants don’t have non-alcoholic alternatives where you live?
Not most, some do!
that’s a shame, there are some really good ones nowadays. don’t think i’ve been to a place without an alternative in years.
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
Wine is way to pretentious for me. Middling bourbon and a splash of cola.
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.
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
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.
Wait, isn’t this very exploitable? Like by changing the bottle or the label lmao
Do they charge corkage on wine they do sell you?
Basically yes, in the form of a markup on the bottle’s price.
