BYOB and Corkage Etiquette 

Apparently belying my supposedly combative and anti- social personality, our next door neighbors graciously invited my wife and me join them for dinner at a Conejo restaurant with the #2 wine list in the area. To show our appreciation for this rarely made invitation ( by anybody), I volunteered to bring a wine from my copious cellar. The neighbor told me that she was sure that the restaurant would not allow us to BOOB (Bring Our Own Bottle).

I called the restaurant to confirm her statement and discovered that not only would  the restaurant allow us to BOOB but that their corkage charge  (The fee they would charge for serving our wine) was the lowest in the area.

Increased interest in wine in the last 10years has created many significant home cellars and a commensurate interest in BYOB and corkage. Now, many wine collectors often believe that their selection is better than the restaurant and They BTOB.

And that is the basic etiquette of corkage. It is considered in bad taste to use the corkage option just to save money on the  wine. Thus you should not show up with a $3 bottle of White Zinfandel. Corkage provides the wine aficionado the opportunity to enjoy their meal with a great wine that is not on the restaurant’s wine list. It sort of started when comedian Mel Brooks would show up at a French restaurant with a couple of 25 year old Burgundies or Bordeaux’s that were worth $150 each at that time.

Requirements have dropped as corkage has proliferated. But the basic premise is that you should bring only serious wines and they should be more serious as the restaurant becomes more serious. At haute cuisine restaurants, the wine you bring should be at least 10 years old and equal in value to the upper end of the restaurants wine list.

If you bring a wine to a local medium priced restaurant in this area, the wine should be at least 5 years old, and thus older than most of the wines on their  wine list. It should have a current retail value of at least $50. That really means that if you are going to a liquor store to buy a wine to BOOB, you generally are violating the principals of basic corkage etiquette.

Finally most restaurants reasonable policy is that if the wine you bring is on the wine list and is the same or younger vintage, you are denied corkage.

Corkage today ranges from $2 at places like Café Bizou where they don’t care what you bring and use the low corkage as a promotional tool to generate traffic to $35 at high end restaurants with top wine lists such as Casanova in Carmel. They are essentially telling you that you probably shouldn’t BYOB unless you have a $300 Echezaux or Gaja in your cellar that you want with your dinner that evening.