Restaurant Wine Markup Explained: What You Really Pay, and How to Pick the Bottle Worth It

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have paid restaurant prices for the wrong bottle more times than I like to admit, so I built the fix into Sommo.

Here is the short answer. In the UK, restaurants usually charge about 2.5 to 4 times what the same wine costs in a shop. When the restaurant critic Andy Hayler analysed UK wine lists, he found an average of about three times retail, and 14% of the lists he looked at had at least one bottle marked up ten times or more, as The Independent reported. Markup is normal. Paying a high markup for a dull wine is the bit you can avoid.

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Restaurant Wine Markup Explained: What You Really Pay, and How to Pick the Bottle Worth It