Ask the WC 36: Restaurant wine, holiday wine, past vintages

This edition of Ask the WC: Restaurant wine prices keep going up, plus questions about holiday wine and past vintages

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
I went out to dinner with some friends at a high-end steakhouse, and I couldn’t believe the prices. How about $100 for a glass of wine? What’s going on there?
Chapped off

Dear Chapped:
I guess the restaurant wine business, faced with building its business back after the pandemic, decided to do it at one fell swoop with lots of high prices. I warned them about this (and took some flak for it), but it’s not all the different from the restaurant wine model before the pandemic. The irony, as one wine marketer told me the other day, is that many restaurants are still sitting on lots of wine left from before the pandemic. Meanwhile, business still hasn’t rebounded completely, so you’d think they’d be more reasonable about prices. In which case, apparently, you’d be wrong.

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Hi, Jeff:
Do you ever get tired writing about holiday wine? I’ve been reading your site for a while, and it seems like having to do the same stories every year would wear you out?
Just curious

Dear Curious:
You ask a question that used to drive newspaper food editors crazy in the old days (and may still do so — I haven’t talked to many in a while). How do you write what is essentially the same story every year and keep it interesting? I’m lucky that I’m just doing wine suggestions, which is far less difficult than finding a way to explain turkey roasting in a new and inventive way each holiday.

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Hey, WC:
You mention past vintages a lot. What does that mean?
New reader

Dear New:
Past, or previous, vintages are exactly that — everything that isn’t the current vintage. So if the current vintage is 2021, then 2020, 2019, and so forth are past vintages. That’s one way to tell the health of the wine business; if you see a lot of past vintages on shelves, then there is a lot of unsold wine in warehouses and in inventory. And that’s not a good thing, since it means a lot of wine is not being sold.

Photo: Marcus Herzberg via Pexels

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