Wine Whine
The only time I’ve ever lost my temper on the airwaves was over a decade ago on KCUR 89.3’s Walt Bodine Show. A caller posed this question to a panel of restaurant critics: “How much are you required to tip on a bottle of wine? If you order a $40 bottle of wine with dinner, why should you have to tip on that purchase? The only thing the waiter does is open it.”
The only member of that particular program’s panel who had never really worked in a restaurant was, naturally, the first one to pipe up with an opinion. I’m not outing him as a tightwad, and I can’t recall the exact wording of his response, but the essence of his answer was that he either didn’t tip on wine at all or deducted the price of the wine from the check when calculating the tip before maybe throwing in a couple of extra bucks.
I sputtered my rebuttal because I was so offended by the cavalier sensibility of both the caller and my fellow critic. A server is a commissioned salesperson, I argued. Why should he or she be penalized for selling an expensive bottle of wine? No one would suggest that a restaurant patron leave the exact same tip for a burger than they would for, say, a Kansas City strip, though it may take exactly the same level of effort to take both plates of food from the kitchen to the customer’s table.
I have never claimed to be a wine connoisseur, but in the early days of my 16-year serving career, I attended enough professional wine tastings to be able to make some kind of reasonable recommendation to customers unfamiliar with the vintages on the wine list. It was pretty easy in the early 1970s, when most casual-dining customers rarely ordered wine; if they did, it usually was a glass of white zinfandel or the rotgut “house Chablis.” The good news: I had only one customer who wouldn’t tip on the vino.
I bring up this argument because a friend of mine — who has a dazzling knowledge of fine wine — likes to make a big production of ordering rare and costly vintages at local restaurants. When the check comes, he doesn’t tip a percentage of the final tally of the bill; instead, he deducts the cost of the wine. Servers loathe him.
My friend Larry Roth, author of the Living Cheap News, is very frugal, but he still tips: “The wine, like the food, the service and the ambience, is all part of the dining experience,” he says. “I tip on the whole package.”
That’s my whine … where do you weigh in?
