A lot of bottle

Every few years WINE conducts a survey of reader interests and information. Results show that not only is wine a central focus of our readers' interests, but food as well - particularly restaurants. But how do we know about how restaurants view wine? Fiona McDonald reports.As wine lovers we bring our values and opinions to bear when faced with a restaurant wine list. How often have you been pleasantly surprised by a really good offering? Not too often, right?

 

The usual scenario is that you arrive at a restaurant, looking forward to a delicious meal and a good night out with friends or family – and then you see the wine list… What’s on it? All the usual suspects – wines that appear on lists from Alberton to Zeerust. If you’re anything like us wine anoraks at WINE mag, you’ll wish that you’d listened to your little inner voice and taken along your own wine “just in case”.

Our wine-inclined perspective is that paying corkage of anything up to R60 is acceptable. After all, if you’d had to buy that bottle in a restaurant – assuming that it was available – you’d have had to pay two or three times the retail price. And if it’s “ordinary/everyday” wine, you’d rather drink beer…

WINE magazine’s restaurant reviews lists each restaurant’s salient details: address, hours of opening, contact details – and whether it has a BYO policy. Corkage is apparently something unique to South Africa and Australia. But what do those three little letters mean to restaurateurs?

Responses ranged from: “ It’s outrageous!” to “we allow it if it’s a special bottle or a special occasion” to “we really don’t mind at all”. And that was from a selection of restaurants in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. Pete Goff e-Wood of PGW Eat and Kitchen Cowboys has recently opened up Cassia, a restaurant at Nitida wine farm in Durbanville, in partnership with Nitida owner Bernhard Veller and fellow chef David Grier.

“I think it’s outrageous that patrons should be allowed to bring their own wines. People don’t expect to be able to bring their own beers along – or food for that matter. It’s almost like saying bring your own sarmies or pizza and sit on our deck – oh, and we’ll give you a plate, napkin, knife and fork and you go ahead and enjoy your meal!”

Sounding a note of pragmatic caution was Johnathan Steyn of Belthazar, a specialist wine bar and steakhouse in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. “There are many restaurants out there that couldn’t be bothered to take the trouble to devise their own wine lists. In that case I can fully understand people wanting to take along their own wines. Sometimes restaurant owners don’t know enough about wine or feel comfortable enough to draw up a selection of wines that complements their style of food. But at Belthazar wine is our business. We have around 250 wines by the glass and about 200 different bottles on our list. Unless it’s a super-special bottle or an import, we don’t allow it.”

Popular Cape Town seafood restaurant Willoughby’s sells 80 cases of wine a week – 40 cases of Sauvignon Blanc alone! Manager Cameron Stewart said their experience of wine sales had changed since Willoughby’s opened a dedicated wine shop alongside the restaurant.

“Previously we never encouraged BYO – but found that people did it anyway! In Cape Town you almost have to allow it because people are quite wine inclined and feel they have a right to bring along their own bottle. And to be honest, you’re going to find that in about 80% of all restaurants the wine lists are identical or largely similar. That’s boring and is doing nothing to get people trying new wines or experimenting.”

In similar vein, Goff e-Wood’s observation after years of being involved with a range of restaurants such as La Couronne, Blues and Salt is that diners “often bring cheap or boring wines”.

While Willoughby’s has 14 diff erent wines on their list, diners are more than welcome to visit the adjacent wine shop. There’s a two-tier pricing system in place: one is a ‘take-away’ price and the other is a ‘table’ price. “Of course you do get people who swear they’re buying the wine for home consumption and pay the lower price – and then promptly sit down at a table outside... like the idea’s just occurred to them…”

Stewart said Willoughby’s price policy was a simple one – they double the retail price, or apply 100% mark-up rather than 200% or 300% which many other restaurants do. “And our shop mark up is a standard 30% retail mark-up.”

A lot of the arguments for and against BYO are short-sighted and emotional Bernhard Veller of Cassia and Nitida said. “I think mark-ups are getting a bit aggressive, but in comparison to those in UK restaurants, they’re still good. I admit that there are a lot of restaurants that don’t want to go to the effort of getting a liquor licence because of the schlep involved.

“People seem to think that restaurants make so much money – which is looking at it simplistically. It’s cost us R9 million to build this restaurant. You work out what the fi nancing on that is! Our set-up costs for our wine list is R60 000 – that’s just wine purchases – and we haven’t got our liquor licence yet. That’s before we’ve bought one crystal glass or even sold a single bottle of wine… and it all had to be cash-on-delivery because we’re a new place.”

Dario De Angeli of Yum Nostalgia in Johannesburg eschews BYO. “We’ve taken a lot of trouble over our wine list. We’ve selected good wines, at a range of price points, that suit the food we prepare. We provide good glasses, ice buckets, trained staff and cellar the wines in optimum conditions.

“Having said that, we are open to negotiation. I don’t mind relaxing the rules for a large group celebrating a special event such as a birthday or engagement. But in these special cases either I choose the wine – or myself and the customer do it together – and I charge between R60 and R80 a bottle corkage.”

De Angeli also has a unique solution to special customers. “We have a regular patron who only drinks Burgundy. I mean, what do you charge a guy who brings in a R15 000 bottle of wine?! My trade off is that I get a glass – and last week I got to enjoy a 1978 Domaine Romanee Conti...”

I recounted an anecdote of a wine farmer who ordered his own wine in a Johannesburg restaurant and paid three times the retail price. He was outraged that he had given the restaurant a trade discount on the retail price, cutting his profit margin to around R5, and yet the restaurateur made R100 for the same bottle of wine.

Veller spoke with both wine farmer and restaurant owner hats on: “Anyone who operates a business applies a standard formula of selling his goods – no matter what they are – at 40% cost of sales. Selling your product at less than 60% gross profit isn’t a very good business model. So that wine producer should examine his costs and his prices.”

There’s a misconception, Goffe-Wood believes, that restaurants are making money hand over first. “That’s because they don’t know what goes into it. I think people are more attuned to retail wine prices than food prices – because they buy wine X at Pick ’n Pay or Ultra Liquors for R50 and see it on a restaurant list at R150. Ooh!The restaurant’s making R100 a bottle… But when it comes to food prices, the same standard mark-up applies.

“There’s an assumption that because you’ve got 100 people spending an average of R100 a head, you’ve made R10 000. Not so... we’ve had costs just like any other business. Rental space, cost of setting up with tables, linen, crockery, cutlery, cost of food, staff costs.

I have 20 people in the kitchen who work unsociable hours – and work damn hard. They have to be paid. So, like any other business, I’ve made maybe R2 000.”

De Angeli tells of an experience he had dining at a restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland, during his year of travelling abroad. “They never presented me with a traditional bill for food. What I received was an itemised list which included the hire of the space occupied by the table for a certain period of time, hire of the table, hire of the linen, glassware and cutlery, the labour cost of the person serving you... and so on. The food cost was marginal. I thought it was a brilliant way of getting patrions to realise the operating costs a restaurant has, as well as fairer way of charging for the dining experience.”

But then De Angeli also tells the story of another customer who said he’d never had Zinfandel before but didn’t have the courage to order it off the list. “Here’s the bottle – try it. If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it. If you do like it, you pay for it. No problem.”

That kind of flexibility is unusual and sets restaurants such as Yum Nostalgia apart from run-of-the-mill establishments.

Restaurant owners who take the trouble to offer an exciting, well-thought-out and careful wine selection will benefit – as will their clientele.