Q: At a dinner out with friends, we ordered an expensive bottle of Chardonnay. When the bill came, they insisted that we didn’t need to include the cost of the wine when calculating the tip, only the food. Is this true?
A: Your waiter is entitled to a tip on the cost of the meal and the alcohol. The exception: When a wine steward, or a sommelier, selects a bottle and serves you. If so, the wine expert is given a separate gratuity of 15 percent to 20 percent (depending on the service, as well as the price and number of bottles ordered), and your waiter should be the tipped only on the food portion of the tab. Customers usually hand a wine steward cash at the end of the meal (he should come to the table when you’re done), but if you want to pay for everything by credit card, look for an extra line on the bill just for the wine tip.
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Every restaurant is different. In some restaurants, the Sommelier gets a percentage of the servers tip. In others, they don’t. At nearly every restaurant, the server pays a percentage of the check to the house to cover the bussers, hosts, bartenders, etc.. So, if alcohol is on the check, the server is paying for it. If you’re paying by credit card and you tell the server that $20 of that is for the Sommelier, the server is the one paying taxes on it. So, have cash if they don’t get part of the servers tip.
If in doubt, ask. They will happily tell you
In the event you do not require the services of a sommelier, you should tip on the price of the wine, no matter how much it costs? Even though it takes no greater effort to find, open, and pour a $20 bottle of wine as it does a $1000 bottle of wine?
Jenna wrote:
“In the event you do not require the services of a sommelier, you should tip on the price of the wine, no matter how much it costs? Even though it takes no greater effort to find, open, and pour a $20 bottle of wine as it does a $1000 bottle of wine”?
Well Jenna, it takes no greater effort to bring you a $60 steak than it does to bring you a $10 hamburger. Yet, you still tip the same percentage, right?
Most servers will understand if you don’t tip the same 20% on the $1000 bottle of wine. But you should still tip on it. After all, it *does* take a bit more care in removing the cork on such a bottle (often times a “$1000 bottle” is going to be older and the cork more fragile). Also, in most restaurants that offer a “$1000 bottle”, if it’s a red wine, it’s going to be decanted, and yes, that takes “greater effort” than your twist-off bottle of $20 White Zinfandel, not to mention that some restaurants require the use of nicer crystal glasses for the more expensive wines, glasses that have to be hand-polished (and sometimes hand-washed). You can obviously afford the $1000 bottle of wine and it’s obviously giving you a sense of wealth, power and prestige, so you should not be getting those feelings on the back of your server, who might have to be basing his or her tipout on a percentage of the amount of sales.
Also to be considered is the amount of wine training on a server’s own time (and in the restaurant) necessary to be a server in a restaurant that sells a $1000 bottle of wine. The minute you step in the door, your expectations are automatically higher (as they should be) and you should be willing to pay for that experience. Anybody can serve a $20 bottle of wine without much more training than learning how to twist a cap or remove a cork, but that same person might not be able to open a bottle of Margaux (I’ve seen some fairly experienced people tremble at the thought because of the pressure of getting it right). Servers in expensive restaurants are required to know a lot more about wine than just reading the label back to you. You’re paying for the experience that you might actually need at some point.
Here’s the thing, some people have even extended this line of thought to $100 bottles of wine, even though, on some wine lists, this is only a “mid-priced wine”.
It’s not about “how much effort”, it’s about the price at the bottom of the bill adjusted according to the level of service that the guest has received.
As the answer indicated, there has always been a tradition of tipping the sommelier for their services. Most of the time, the server is now the sommelier. Obviously, most servers don’t have the same level of expertise as a sommelier, but servers in restaurants that have expensive bottles normally have more “wine skills” than the average server.
So, tell a friend. No, you don’t exclude a bottle of wine from the tipping process.
PS, and if you are allowed to bring in a bottle of wine, you should add to your tip to make up for the lost sales. The real savvy wine collector will tip fully on the estimated retail price, but most servers will be happy with say, tipping 25% instead of 20% (assuming that the server gave excellent service, of course). This is including the cost of corkage if it’s charged.
“So You Want To Be A Waiter” blog