Restaurant Wine Pricing: A Rebuttal

By Patrick Comiskey Thu., Sep. 13 2012 at 11:00 AM

wine cork

With respect to Los Angeles wine list prices, my colleague Besha Rodell appears to be experiencing some sticker shock lately. I don't altogether blame her. L.A.'s wine menus are expensive, and markups are often egregious, especially for popular items you could find in a retail shop for a fraction of the price.

Lately, however, Rodell has noticed a creep on the low end, where $40 is the new $30. She takes the Venice restaurant Gjelina to task for the absence of low-priced wine selections, comparing it with a restaurant in Echo Park, Red Hill, whose offerings on the low end, she finds, are more reasonable.

I think, though, that it's a bit unreasonable to compare wine programs at a wildly popular Abbot Kinney institution and an up and coming Echo Park eatery. Rents on Abbot Kinney no doubt dwarf those in Echo Park for restaurant properties (as must the incomes for their respective residents). You'd be naïve not to expect to pay a premium to dine at the hottest restaurant in Venice Beach -- and indeed the food menu prices at Gjelina are noticeably more expensive than at Red Hill (though not exorbitantly so).

But you wouldn't insist that a restaurant lower its food menu prices because the ingredients are so much cheaper at Whole Foods, any more than you'd demand an Echo Park price for a Venice bungalow.

For all this, economics plays just a fractional role here; what's really at play is behavioral science. The truth is the lowest priced wines on the wine list are invariably the poorest sellers. Ask any wine director in the city to corroborate this: The low end is the third rail of American wine programs. Any wine on Gjelina's list priced below $40 would no doubt languish. No matter how good the wine is, it's axiomatic that restaurant patrons avoid the least expensive bottles for fear of looking cheap. (And imagine how that psychology is amplified if you're dining on image-conscious Abbot Kinney.) Instead, Gjelina has a dozen selections below $50 for its guests to choose from, all sort of lumped together in price so that no 'cheapest' wine really announces itself.

Gjelina's wine list is very good -- a tad pricey, perhaps, but not outrageous (there are, in fact, very good deals on the high end). A highly curated list like this one takes time, work, and effort to assemble, and should be compensated for. When's the last time you had a Petite Arvine from the Valle d'Aosta? How likely are you to go to your retailer and ask for one without having had someone to guide you there? (And what are the odds they've got it? Pretty much nil.)

There's a limit of course as to how much you'll spend to indulge a sommelier's arcane explorations, just as there's a limit to how much you're willing to be gouged. But the point is you're paying for an experience; and if you waste part of that experience worrying over $10, then certainly you're missing something.

Patrick Comiskey, our drinks columnist, blogs at patrickcomiskey.com and tweets at @patcisco. Want more Squid Ink? Follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

Location Info

Venue

Map

Gjelina

1429 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

Category: Restaurant

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Tags:

Gjelina, Patrick Comiskey, Red Hill, wine

We Recommend

patrick.comiskey

And thanks for your response Besha.

Perhaps a better phrase than 'rebuttal' would have been 'an alternative view,' the purpose of which was to point out that wine list pricing is a fairly complex business. I do agree that as a wine list author you pick your own lowest common denominator, and that isn't an arbitrary decision.

However I continue to take issue with the notion that since you can get a wine at retail much more cheaply - an argument made in both posts - that a restaurant's pricing is automatically suspect. That to me it is an oversimplification that inevitably reduces the a very complicated system to dollars and cents and little else, and always makes the restaurant appear greedy.

pjc

brodell

Thanks, Patrick, for taking the time to think and write about the pricing issue. Like the other commenter, I kind of think what you're saying is more of a detailed reasoning about rising prices rather than a rebuttal, but I don't want to argue about semantics :)

You're right that Gjelina's costs are probably higher than Red Hill's (although I also suspect that Gjelina makes money - if we were to look at which restaurant is in a more precarious financial situation, I'd surely say Red Hill). But my point was that, to deal with those costs, Gjelina wouldn't start charging $30 for pizza - the wine list is a place they can offer higher prices without it seeming too crazy. If the low end of the list always languishes and the low end is raised by $10, then the sweet spot of the list also changes. If the low end was $32 then the sweet spot is $45 - if the list starts at $45, that sweet spot becomes $60. You say that having a number of wines grouped at $40-50 negates that - wouldn't having a group of wines in the $30 range also do that? It is, after all, a pizza place - spending $50 on a bottle of wine with your pizza, especially a bottle from Gjelina's list (which I also love), is a treat. But I do think some people would appreciate a more affordable option. I also think that tut-tutting over whether people should notice the difference between a $40 or $50 bottle of wine does nothing to overcome one of wine's greatest hurdles, which is to negate the idea that it's something for people who don't need to worry about such distinctions.

ddk0

Never eaten at Gjelina. Just curious if the low end dozen there used to be priced less than $50? If they were, that would tend to support a rebuttal of the rebuttal...

r2s2

What are you rebutting? Besha said the rise in prices is a trend, and here is a good restaurant with good prices. You confirm this with an economic explanation.