Wine price markup at restaurants: your thoughts please.

Lately alt.food.wine displays many queries on wine markups and on such questions as what is a hogshead (re barrels). Mr. Bueno, I note that you are not completely new here. Do you own a general dictionary, for basics like "hogshead?" I found the word instantly. I could probably have found it by self-service even online. Have you done any research on the perennial history of wine price markup discussion on the Usenet wine groups (effortlessly available by archive search, back to 1982)?. If not, why not? If so, why do you not explain what you have found in the corpus of easy online data, before asking for more? groups.google.com showed 430 hits on "markup" for alt.food.wine. (Please understand, if you just want to chat, I am delighted and welcome it. It is the asking of tired questions _before_ tapping the existing answers, that I protest.) This must be the #1 Netiquette exception today -- Google cites it (below).

(I am awed that a recent, likely innocent newcomer here was discouraged curtly on mere suspicion of trolling, while things like this are repeatedly indulged. It seems that all Netiquette faults are equal, but some are much more equal than others. If there is more to this situation, I'd appreciate a constructive email from a third party.)

(The Usenet helps those who help themselves!)

MH

-------- It turns out there is such a thing as a stupid question. It's the one that gets asked right after someone answered it for the 100th time in a newsgroup discussion.

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in article snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com, Max Hauser at snipped-for-privacy@THIStdl.com wrote on 6/27/04 1:11 AM:

I really have no horse in this race, but some of the positions/attitudes on this group have begun to get under my skin lately. You ask for 3rd party input.........

I did a Google Groups search for "markup poll" @alt.food.wine and found that Mr. Bueno is the poster of the majority of the items on that specific subject, having begun his poll over a month ago. I guess I fail to see how his desire to quantify the opinions on this subject (apparently worth of, indeed, 431 total posts) should be singled out for what can only be taken as ridicule. If every poster who did not do a Google search before asking a question was handled this way I think most of us would just just read this group and never post. Is that what you want?

It seems that there is a pattern that occurs on these 'boards' where long-time posters periodically become annoyed by newer people bringing up tired, over-done subjects. That's totally understandable. But somewhere in the Newsgroup etiquette archives there must be something about how to discourage that politely.

"Midlife" wrote: . . .

Good point "Midlife" and I apologize to other readers for my sensitivity on this point, and to Mr. Bueno.

The issue of the repetitive query on newsgroups (which Google singled out in the quotation) is very old, and has worn some of us down, and it seems to be accelerating. Suggestions for gracious handling would be welcome. (I have searched.) The Lachenmann/Rosenberg FAQ list for this group does recommend "Respect the readers of the group. / - Try using web resources before peppering the group with questions." (The problem is not that the tree is harvested incompletely, but that even the low-hanging fruit isn't picked.)

Max H.

I think it is all a question of balance here. Personally I have not been offended by any of Leo's posts. In fact I think it is generally a well-disciplined group all round.

More generally, on the subject of questions that could be answered by dictionaries, and repeat discussions, I think to an extent the onus is on all of us to deal with them by replying directly with a FAQ reference or link to another website, or - even better - try to inject life into the thread. For example, I am sure there are many factoids about hogsheads that dictionary.com does not reveal. Likewise - there are potentially many new angles on old topics.

None needed.

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