PRICING IT RIGHT

How much? How much for a bottle of cabernet or chardonnay or shiraz? How much for merlot or sauvignon blanc? How much for a glass? For a case? For that matter, how much for a tankerful? How much is enough? What do you think?

In the world of oil politics, you’ll sometimes hear a saying. “They can’t drink it.” In other words, to make money they have to sell it: Saudis, Texans, Russians, and Venezuelans alike.

Restaurants, of course, don’t sell oil, not the kind found deep below the bedrock at the bottom of the Caspian Sea. Restaurants sell wine, however, the kind that is found in growing abundance in at least five of our globe’s seven continents, as well as on the tables of our dining establishments.

How much should it cost? Can you sell a couple of labels of good wine for $10 a bottle? In his much publicized campaign challenging restaurateurs to do just that and turn America into a wine drinking nation, Bronco Winery co-founder Fred Franzia has certainly made a lot of restaurateurs angry. Some of his competitors don’t like him either. The thing is, Fred is often right. Think about it.

How much should wine cost your customer? I know that many if not most of Cheers readers would like such questions to go away. They are, uhm, politically incorrect. Even posing them seems to imply that the correct answer is that restaurant wine prices should be lower. That’s terribly na