BYOB

Some restaurants offer a BYOB or “Bring Your Own Bottle” program, allowing you to bring a wine from home to accompany your meal and only be charged a “corkage fee”. From many accounts, it doesn’t seem to be working well. Why? To begin, most restaurants that offer it don’t advertise such worth a darn. They’d much prefer you buy wine off their wine list instead where they’ll make a decent buck from their markups. Perhaps, customers feel cheap or embarrassed by wanting to bring a wine from home rather than purchasing the eateries’. Finally, if diners do take advantage of this program, rather than bring special, rare, or old vintages that mean something to them, many tend to bring bottles where the corkage fee equals or surpasses the wines’ value. Kind of ludicrous!