The real reason your wine costs so much at restaurants

After 15 years of reviewing restaurants for The Post, I still get the jitters when the wine list comes.

Sure, snooty sommeliers of old have been replaced by friendly faces who know how to sell more with smiles than sneers.

What’s daunting is knowing how much wines should cost. Never a cinch except for experts, it’s gotten harder than ever thanks to prices that increasingly run all over the map — sometimes even at places owned by the same people. Two new apps try to cut the vineyard jungle down to size, but only compound confusion.

Unfathomable pricing has always been part of the dining-out terroir.

Typically, wines in restaurants cost twice what someone would pay in a store and 3½ times the wholesale price. But that’s little help when: a) You have no idea what the wholesale price is, and b) You’re confronted by columns of half-familiar, confusingly named vintages from all over the globe.


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