The Answer Man: Tipping on Wine
By FRANK BRUNI
TAGS: ANSWER MAN, SOMMELIERS & WINE DIRECTORS, WINE LISTS
(Evan Sung for The New York Times)
Prompted by a wine-related post on this blog earlier this week, a reader wrote in to raise another issue concerning the ordering of — and paying for — wine in restaurants. It’s an issue I occasionally hear discussed and debated among people I knew, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Here’s the reader’s e-mail:
“Your recent blog posting re: mistakenly ordered bottles of wine brought up a question a few friends and I had while recently dining at Daniel. Let’s say you do order a $2,000 bottle, or one even more expensive: $10,000. Are you expected to tip 20% of that bottle’s worth?
“I say yes, most likely, and a friend disagreed,” the reader’s e-mail continued. “What is the general consensus regarding this?
It’s an interesting question, and one I feel utterly unqualified to answer on my own, because I’ve never ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine, or for that matter a $1,000 bottle of wine, or for that matter even a $500 bottle of wine. None are within my personal budget, and I think my overlords at The Times would rightly balk at restaurant tabs inflated by wines of such expense.
Comma splices, bad moods, a messy desk, a dinged laptop: the powers that be will suffer through, and roll with, all of that.
But an $800 Burgundy at a review dinner? They wouldn’t be amused, and I wouldn’t dare.
So, to answer the reader’s question, I reached out to a small group of knowledgeable people: several serious wine consumers, several city sommeliers.
And after talking or e-mailing with them, I concluded that there is no one established, accepted, unequivocal etiquette for tipping on a check whose lofty amount is reflective primarily of one or two bottles of incredibly expensive wine.
In that sense the comments generated by this post should be useful: perhaps they’ll give each of us a sense of what other diners do — or would do. Perhaps from this variety of perspectives and diversity of opinions a middle road will emerge.
Then again, there’s a limited number of readers who face the quandary of how to tip on wine that’s, say, $300 and up a bottle. But let’s fantasize that we all do.
One of the wine-savvy people from whom I sought wisdom and guidance on this topic is the senior sommelier at a highly respected Manhattan restaurant with a superior wine list, including wines over the $1,000-a-bottle mark.
He told me that most of the diners there who order such wines tip around 20 percent on their checks, including the price of the wine.
But he said that that reality largely reflects those diners’ relationships with the restaurant. They’re regulars who come in all the time, and so they’ve established the kind of familiarity with the staff — and the staff has established the kind of familiarity with them — that entails a lot of personal attention, a lot of coddling. The tips they give are tied into the perpetuation of their special status in the restaurant, and aren’t necessarily reflective of a philosophy of tipping a full 20 percent even on $1,500 bottles of wine.
This same sommelier said that few servers and few restaurants would be surprised — or feel significantly cheated — by a tip of 10 to 15 percent on a significantly high check whose principal component is pricey wine.
He was referring, he said, to this kind of scenario: a $1,600 check built from just $600 of food and a $1,000 bottle of wine. If the table in question tipped $250 instead of $320, he said, the server and restaurant would instantly understand why, and wouldn’t feel that the amount was out of line.
I’d add this: in my opinion, a diner should factor into his or her considerations not simply the amount of the bill represented by wine but how many bottles of wine went into that amount.
If a $1,600 check is built from $600 of food and $1,000 of wine but the $1,000 comprises three bottles — each selected after consultation with servers, each presented to the table with the requisite ceremony, each decanted, each poured bit by bit into diners’ glasses — that’s a lot more work for the restaurant than one $1,000 bottle. And in that case I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable tipping differently than I would for a $1,600 check built from $1,200 of food and $400 of wine.
After talking with the aforementioned sommelier, I got an e-mail from a big spender I know well, someone who likes expensive wines and doesn’t hesitate to buy them. And he has more than a few friends like him.
He wrote: “I think the general practice for most of my friends is to drop the tip closer to the 15 percent range on the total bill when the wine is a huge component (greater than 60 percent) of the cost.” He used the word “drop” because it’s usually his habit to tip 20 percent or more for excellent service in a restaurant.
In my question to him about wine tipping, I’d floated the hypothetical scenario of an $800 bottle. In his answer he noted: “I rarely order something that costly, but on the occasions I do, it is generally at a restaurant I where I am a regular, often as part of a celebration, and the host or sommelier will buy me an after-dinner drink, desserts, etc., to thank me for ordering the wine. In these situations, I often keep the tip at 20 percent to offset their generosity.”
I also forwarded the reader’s e-mail to my colleague and friend Eric Asimov, the newspaper’s wine critic and the author of a blog, The Pour, that warrants faithful reading.
Eric responded: “I’m not sure what you’re ‘supposed’ to do. I haven’t read any advice from etiquette experts. But my feeling is: you tip on the bottom line, including the wine. Which I guess is another way of saying that if you can afford the $10,000 bottle of wine, then you can afford a tip commensurate with the restaurant’s level of expertise and the quality of its care.
Unless, of course, the service doesn’t meet what, at that level of spending, ought to be flawless standards. In which case you decide what you want to tip just as you do any other time. But I don’t think that 20 percent on a $10,000 bottle is any more absurd than on a $100 bottle. It’s just part of the experience.”
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