Please excuse my grumbling again about this subject, but it continues to annoy me.
A few weeks ago I stayed at the Chicago Hilton and brought back a price list of the wines they were selling at one of its restaurant/bars, Kitty O'Sheas. Here it is (no vintages listed):
Black Opal Chardonnay $33 Wolf Blass Riesling $38 Greg Norman Chardonnay $38 Black Opal Cabernet/Merlot Blend $33 Wolf Blass Shiraz $39
I was aware that Black Opal was usually an inexpensive product, but thought that maybe wine prices in Illinois were out of whack, perhaps due to post-prohibition taxation. So, I went to wine-searcher.com and ran a search (pro version) for all of these wines, limiting the location to Illinois (for non-US folk, that's the state in which Chicago is located).
For each wine, I picked the *highest* listed price I could find for the available vintages. Here are the results:
Black Opal Chardonnay $7 Wolf Blass Riesling $13 Greg Norman Chardonnay $13 Black Opal Cabernet/Merlot Blend $8 Wolf Blass Shiraz $10
I also called the restaurant and requested vintage information; a return recorded message yielded the list below.
2003 Black Opal Chardonnay 2002 Wolf Blass Riesling 2002 Greg Norman Chardonnay 2002 Black Opal Cabernet/Merlot Blend 2001 Wolf Blass ShirazHowever, I question the reliability of the message, since, for example, it looks like there is no such beast as a 2003 Black Opal Chard (see
As you can see, the markups from conservative retail prices range from
2.9 times to 4.7 times.The restauranteurs in the group will excuse me, but charging $33 for a bottle of Black Opal Chardonnay, nearly 5 times a conservative retail price, is ludicrous.
Note by the way, that the 2002 Greg Norman Chard is available at Binnys Beverage depot in Skokie (Chicago area) for $11, so the restaurant was marking up this product as much as 3.5X from a local retail price. The 2001 Wolf Blass Shiraz is listed at Binnys and Sam's Wines (right in Chicago) for $9, yielding a 4.3X markup.
Your thoughts please--and clicks, if you are so inclined, at the RESTAURANT WINE MARKUP POLL,
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