Wedding - Corkage Prices

slumped · 04-05-2006 02:01PM #1

Getting married soon. Hotel (4*) wants to charge us €12 corkage per bottle of wine. We are bringing in our own at cost but find the corkage very high.

Anyone know what standard rate is for this? Mods feel free to move if not right forum.

S

04-05-2006 02:05PM

What do you mean corkage? Opening the bottle??

kippy · 04-05-2006 02:05PM

I dont know if there is a standard rate but I know-the last wedding I was at in Galway the corkage fee was €8

Sleepy · 04-05-2006 02:08PM

That's fvckin' ridiculous. A corkage charge shouldn't be any more than one or two euro per bottle imho.

kippy · 04-05-2006 02:11PM

I agree sleepy,
I think anything over three Euro is a joke but it'll be interesting to see the differences in rates from hotel to hotel and county to county.

Beruthiel · 04-05-2006 02:16PM

slumped wrote:

Getting married soon. Hotel (4*) wants to charge us €12 corkage per bottle of wine.

ffs, that's the price of a bottle of wine!
offer less and see what happens.

Gandhi · 04-05-2006 02:25PM

One place we looked at for our wedding had a "clean-up charge" of $50 if you wanted to smush the cake in each other's faces after cutting it.

Those corking charges are a joke, though. How much does the place charge for one of their own bottles of wine? Is it even worth your while bringing in your own wine?

You can get through a savage amout of wine at a wedding. I think we bought 96 bottles of wine for ours. That would have been €1200 corkage on about $400 worth of wine.

BC · 04-05-2006 02:31PM

Around 8 euro seems to be standard, although friends of mine got quoted everything from 8 to 25 euro!!!!!!

One thing to be careful of - make sure they don't open all the bottles at the start of the night, just as they are required. Some hotels do this which means that you have to pay corkage for all bottles and you can't take home any that are left over.

Sleepy · 04-05-2006 02:38PM

Fvck 'em, tell 'em your little cousin will be uncorking the wine and throw him/her €50 to be the wine waiter for the day

Beruthiel · 04-05-2006 02:41PM

Sleepy wrote:

Fvck 'em, tell 'em your little cousin will be uncorking the wine and throw him/her €50 to be the wine waiter for the day

if you could get away with that, I'd go for it!

or
buy a bunch of cork screws and leave some on each table with the wine

iguana · 04-05-2006 02:45PM

Same as BC I've heard from €8-25. It wouldn't hurt to try negotiate with the hotel, especially if you are paying a lot in total. But I wouldn't hold my breath, I think that the mark-up that gets attached to anything to do with weddings is crazy. I have had quotes for sevices multiply by 5 when I've mentioned it was for a wedding and not a family or business party.

Padraig Mor · 04-05-2006 02:48PM

12€ is only slightly higher than the average. It is usually negotiable - even if it says it's not.

Sleepy · 04-05-2006 03:03PM

Why not just tell them it's a family party rather than a wedding?

MR DAZ · 04-05-2006 04:04PM

I'm in the same boat - getting married later this year , our corkage fee is E9 per bottle ..which is good as all the other hotels are between 12-20 that we looked at.

Also another stupid fee that "SOME" hotels charge for is the use of there function room....

I think thats a disgrace as they sell you food then charge you to sit down and eat it. thank god the hotel went for doesnt have a charge on the function room.

Rogueish · 04-05-2006 04:12PM

A number of the hotels charge corkage at 50% the cost of their house wine. So if they sell their house wine at €20 per bottle they will charge you corkage on your own wine at €10 per bottle.

Bargain them down as low as they will go. I cant see them letting you get wee Jimmy to uncork and serve the wine. I think the idea of buying a couple of corkscrews for each table being a good option.

iguana · 04-05-2006 04:21PM

Rogueish wrote:

I think the idea of buying a couple of corkscrews for each table being a good option.

But I think part of the charge is for the use of their glasses, and the collection and washing of them afterward. And for the possibility of glass breakage or red wine being spilled on their tableclothes and carpet. The charge isn't just for opening the bottles, I doubt they would agree to the corkscrew idea.

Rogueish · 04-05-2006 04:28PM

Good point iguana but it is worth a try. The OP has nothing to lose and everything to gain by suggesting it to the banqueting manager...

Katyspice · 04-05-2006 04:29PM

I got married at a 5* hotel in dublin city center. they would charge corkage if I bought the stuff from them....champagne. Guests were allowed to bring spirits (I rented the penthouse suite)

I think €6-8 is pretty standard.

K

impr0v · 04-05-2006 04:33PM

Offer to buy wine with screw cap bottles (say it's not buckfast as they may have a policy on student weddings) and see what they say then. If they don't reduce it significantly they'll have to rectify the resulting misnomer with 'screwage' which will at least be a more apt description of the charge.

MiCr0 · 04-05-2006 04:36PM

i was under the impression that if you bought the wine from the hotel there was no corkage

WhiteWashMan · 04-05-2006 04:37PM

i found that the price of things went up considerably when i mentioned the word wedding.
fwiw, i found 8-12 to be fairly standard if youre bringing your own.

if youre going to some hotel that just turns weddings around 3 times a week, youll probably find this as standard.

bonkey · 04-05-2006 05:58PM

Sleepy wrote:

That's fvckin' ridiculous. A corkage charge shouldn't be any more than one or two euro per bottle imho.

Where do you think their profit comes from?

What you pay in corkage is effectively equivalent to what you'd be paying in profit-margin on all but the lowest-priced wines, and sometimes even a bit more than that.

Basically, it gives you the option of maybe cutting your costs, or providing a better-than-their-lowest-price wine at a better cost.

Suggesting they do it for nothing or next-to-nothing is little different in concept to bringing a bottle of wine with you to a restaurant and expecting them to let you drink that with your dinner.

If the corkage is higher than their cheapest wine, you probably have grounds to negotiate, but ultimately, their profitability has drink-profit critically taken into account, and there's no way they can or will throw that away.

Sleepy · 04-05-2006 08:53PM

bonkey wrote:

Where do you think their profit comes from?

Let's see, the over-priced meal, the bar, guests renting rooms, the fee for the function room etc. etc. etc.

What you pay in corkage is effectively equivalent to what you'd be paying in profit-margin on all but the lowest-priced wines, and sometimes even a bit more than that.

Basically, it gives you the option of maybe cutting your costs, or providing a better-than-their-lowest-price wine at a better cost.

Suggesting they do it for nothing or next-to-nothing is little different in concept to bringing a bottle of wine with you to a restaurant and expecting them to let you drink that with your dinner.

Many restaurants allow you to do this, most doing so charge a nominal corkage fee, the figure the OP was quoted would be a matter of hundreds of euros for even a small wedding. That's not exactly nominal.

If the corkage is higher than their cheapest wine, you probably have grounds to negotiate, but ultimately, their profitability has drink-profit critically taken into account, and there's no way they can or will throw that away.

I can't believe that there's anything other than a MASSIVE profitability for a hotel in over-charging people for food, renting them rooms and serving them the number of drinks that get consumed at a wedding. Charging anything more than a nominal per-bottle fee or a reasonable flat rate for corkage is really just taking the piss.

TBH, should I ever get married, I'll let my money do my talking and get married elsewhere but I'm still appalled at the manner in which young couples are being screwed because they feel they have to have the 'big day'.

nedoo · 04-05-2006 09:13PM

There is not that much money to be made in functions from the food side. To run a function hall there are massive overheads like public insurance, staffing, light, heat, table ware, food, energy bills, cleaning, maintenance of the hall, and the list will can go on and on. The booze is where the cash is. Your average house wine has a mark up of three times its cost value. If a venue let you take in your own wine for nothing, they are loosing out on a huge chunk of their revenue. Granted they still have the bar profits.
About ten euro would seem about fair to me, all depending on how much you want to bring in. If you want people to be drinking this wine all night, that is going to eat into the bar profits and they will charge more.
A very good point mentioned earlier is about the opening of the wine. Decide how many bottles you want per table and have them on the tables as the guest sit. When they are gone let everybody look after their own then. Places have a great nack of opening all bottle, charging for the lot and you might end up with 3 cases of opened ruined wine to bring home the next day(if the staff haven't robbed it). Bargin with the C&B manager. Your business is worth a lot more to them than a few quid on a bottle of wine.

mikemac · 04-05-2006 09:52PM

I worked in the hotel industry part-time when I was in college and have seen a few of the tricks.

We charged €6.50 corkage but this was 3 years ago so €8-€9 seems about right.

We operated on the 10% principle. Staff were told to use this by management.

If for example,guests used 50 bottles of wine, we charged for 55. On house wine, this was 5 * €15.50. It amounted to over €5,000 a year pure profit as we did 60 weddings a year and plently of other functions.

If the wedding party brought their own wine, the 10% principle applied again. The bar manager kept 4-5 bottles of wine at least and stored them in the celler. Only once in two and a half years did I see someone check the corkage charge when collecting the wine and then query why some bottles were missing.

Very quickly, you'd have over 100 bottles of wine in the celler and this was used for staff parties.

Bar staff would get a round of drinks to have at the end of their shift. This was charged to the wedding party and charged as corkage.
Management didn't care as we weren't stealing from the hotel.

This hotel is in Tipperary and I'm sure it goes on elsewhere. So on average, at least €100 per function was deviously taken per wedding

Gandhi · 04-05-2006 10:09PM

At one of my friends weddings, after the dinner the staff collected up all the opened, but non-empty wine bottles and put them behind the bar. Later on, when people ordered wine, they were being charged for the same wine that the bride and groom had brought themselves, and had paid corkage on.

The groom's Dad noticed and ripped them a new one. I can't remember what the outcome was, though.

slumped · 05-05-2006 08:50AM

OP here.

I'm annoyed with the price because the hotel will gross at least €22,000 from us. I feel they could cut us some slack on the vino.

S

Padraig Mor · 05-05-2006 08:59AM

Saying that corkage charges are fair or that hotels make no money from food is a load of bollox. I'm getting married in August, but because it's on a Thursday, we get free corkage, free arrival drinks and free afters food. The hotel must obviously be making plenty of profit from the food alone to be able to do this.

r3nu4l · 05-05-2006 09:02AM

I'm getting married in Tipp next year and our corkage is €12 per bottle but the house wine would cost €22 per bottle.

By keeping the price of the house wine artificially high they more or less force you to bring your own wine and then make massive profit on it by charging such high corkage.

micmclo and Gandhi - Thanks for the heads up, I will be checking my charges very carefully and also have people watching what happens to unfinished bottles of wine on the night!!

Ponster · 05-05-2006 09:07AM

I understand that 'corkage fee' is just a catch-all term for the hotel to describe all the work that revolves around wine: opening the bottles, serving the wine, washing glasses, collecting bottles....

What if I had a table with boxes of wine where the guests could serve themselves? Does anyone know of anyway to get a hotel to lower their price besides, as suggested, compare their corking fee to the price of their lowest bottle of wine?

Being able to get a good bottle in France for €5 and have to pay more than that for the hotel to 'process it' seems crazy to me.

Siogfinsceal · 05-05-2006 03:13PM

im totally lost why in gods name would anyone pay money for someone to open their bottle of wine????!! f**kin madness open it yourself or get the guests to do it or ask a relative to be in chagre of itim stunned after reading this post to people actually pay for this cr@p

Wedding - Corkage Prices

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