While you can understand why the brand owner is grumpy, to be fair, he's in the wholesale/bulk business and should make up in sales volumes what he lacks in margin.
Still, it does stick in the craw when you consider how little effort the average restaurateur makes to bank his loot from wine. Very few carry more than current stocks, very few offer better than supermarket stemware, and fewer-than-very-few invest in staff training or proper staff remuneration. In the on-con business, wine is money for jam, to mix metaphors (horribly).
Given the largely indisputable facts around restaurant wine mark-ups, you might imagine that those who own successful food businesses live in mansions in the smartest of suburbs. I haven't conducted a residential survey but it's a safe bet that they don't – too many are going under (especially at the moment) for anyone to imagine that high-end dining is a lucrative business. This, in turn, leads to the inescapable conclusion (allowing for the dreadful state of the economy) that either they're bad at running their businesses, or their model is flawed (or both).
There's no doubt that at present trade is tough: when there's little or no disposable income about, dining out is the first luxury to go. In times like these, corporates also cut back on entertainment. Sticking to awful metaphors, it's a duck-or-no-dinner industry - and right now there's not much dinner to go round. But there are operators who are managing, who've survived recessions before, and know-how to trade through lean times.
Mostly they're not milking their wine lists in order to stay afloat. Consumers are truth-seeking devices: in good times they spend money to reward themselves, which is why they knowingly overpay for mediocre food and overpriced wine. However, when the going gets tough, they know exactly where to cut back. The restaurants which are managing well enough through the current recession maintain value items at all times – but the mix changes when the punters are short of cash. The menu still offers tiger prawns and Champagne, but it's the queen prawns (or spatchcocked chicken) and vinho verde which sell in abundance.
A friend of mine recently observed that eating out well in South Africa was starting to cost the price of fine dining around the world (despite the devalued Rand). When I disputed this he pointed out that high profile Cape wines in high profile dining establishments cost him more than what he pays for something decent in London or Milan. Of course, in South Africa, he frequents the kind of restaurants whose clientele has enjoyed a certain notoriety at the Zondo Commission – in other words, people who didn't mind how much they were spending because they were living off “free cash flow.” These are the places which are looking dangerously empty at present, and whose response to the crisis is to ratchet up their prices in the hope that fewer people spending more money will make up for more people spending less. Their creditors better hope that they're correct.
None of this is good news for the wine industry: high margins mean fewer sales while bankruptcies mean bad debts. It's tough enough making a living as a wine producer without having to manage the retail environment - but this is increasingly what is expected. As a result, fewer and fewer wine farms deal directly with licensed establishments. They sub-contract this side of their operations to a distributor, along the way surrendering even more margin (generally around 30%-35%). They have little choice: despite the cost, it's the most efficient way of engaging with a very fragile but vital component of their supply chain.
I have to assume that wine drinkers care about the health of the production sector: we don't want the achievements of our growers and winemakers to be nullified by circumstances (and operators) largely beyond their control. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of environmental activist Greta Thunberg's book and make a noise: every time you dine out to tell the manager or owner of the restaurant what you think of his wine list and his mark-ups. If the margins are unacceptable, tell him/her that you won't be coming back in a hurry. Let the establishment know that wine drinkers aren't willing to subsidise teetotallers and other beverage drinkers. And make sure they understand that for every person who speaks up, there are hundreds who resent the experience and who are less and less likely to return. Take to social media to name and shame the worst culprits. It is astonishing that almost everywhere except in the area of on-consumption mark-ups, consumers have become more vocal. We have only ourselves to blame for the fact that only the super-wealthy (or the super-corrupt) can afford decent wine when they dine out.
