Uncorking the reasons that restaurant wine is so pricey

Why does a 30 bottle suddenly cost three times more when you sit down at a table on a night out are we being ripped off? Hannah Twiggs uncovers what you’re actually paying for

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It was the sort of wine list that prompts a raised eyebrow before the first sip is poured. At a newly opened sushi bar in Notting Hill last week, I spotted one of my favourites: a 2020 montagny premier cru from Domaine Philippe Colin. A crisp, elegant white burgundy. Priced at £85. Familiar, I thought. Later, a quick browse online confirmed it: the same bottle retails for between £28 and £33 from trusted merchants. I hadn’t imagined it. The mark-up was real.

If you’ve dined out recently, you might’ve experienced a similar moment of sticker shock. Wine in restaurants is expensive – sometimes eye-wateringly so. Sometimes it’s more than half the bill. But are diners being fleeced, or is there more to the story? The truth, as is so often the case with wine, lies in the blend.

In the UK, a standard restaurant mark-up on wine is around two and a half to four times the retail price. It’s not unusual to find bottles that are three, even four times what you might pay at your local merchant. And that’s before we get into wines by the glass, where margins can stretch even further. One South African winemaker I dined with recounted watching his chenin blanc, sold to an American restaurant for £9 a bottle, reappear at $25 a glass. In LA, that sort of thing barely raises an eyebrow.

But in the UK, it’s no surprise that many diners might baulk when a familiar bottle appears on a list at three times the price. Data from critic Andy Hayler – who analysed hundreds of wine lists and published his findings in December 2024 – reveals that the average mark-up across British restaurants is about 3.03 times retail. In London, it’s slightly higher. In European fine dining, slightly lower. Some restaurants price conservatively; others, exuberantly. Four times retail is not uncommon. And 14 per cent of wine lists Hayler surveyed included bottles marked up by 10 times or more.