A couple of weeks ago, as I was settling my bill at a great little Denver restaurant, I noticed half the total was for a $40 bottle of wine.
Nothing wrong with that. Wine isn’t free. After food and new strings for my tennis racket, it’s my favorite thing to spend money on.
But the tip I was about to leave was twice as big as it would have been if we’d just stuck with water. Sixteen dollars instead of eight. And what our server did with that wine was retrieve it, pop the cork and pour the first round. More or less the same thing she did with the water.
As a former waiter and bartender, I’m all for tipping generously. My own sloppy method is to calculate 20 percent, then round up to an easy number with a zero or five on the end. Some say that’s too high, but I think they’re wrong: 20 percent and change is fair, especially given how poorly most servers are paid (and forget about benefits).
But still, that $8 jumped out at me. Was I being a sucker?
Sure, if I’d exploited the expertise of a sommelier (which everyone who eats and drinks should do whenever there’s one available), I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
But this restaurant doesn’t have a sommelier, and I chose from its small list myself. I was happy with our choice, even knowing the markup on this particular bottle was well over 100 percent. (It retails for around $17).
Our server, a pro with plates but less comfortable with a corkscrew, struggled to open the bottle. She split the cork, overfilled our glasses and left dribbles on the table. And I tasted cork on my tongue.
None of these bobbles were capital offenses given the relative modesty of the bottle. But they didn’t exactly enhance the overall dining experience.
Naturally, I left a full tip (even rounding up), but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind: Was the haphazard delivery of that wine worth doubling the tip?
I hate to be a sucker, so I asked around. And wouldn’t you know it? Everyone had an opinion.
“No way,” said my friend Mac Folkes, who eats out almost as much as I do. “I don’t tip on water, so why should I tip on wine?”
“It’s like when you go to Banana Republic and they ask at the register whether anyone helped you choose your khakis,” said Marc Leyer, another frequent-diner friend. “The answer is no, because even though someone said, ‘My name is John, let me know if you need any assistance,’ it’s not like having a personal shopper at Nieman’s.”
But Tim Arnold, a wine importer with Polaner Selections in New York, had a different point of view. “You must tip on wine. A 20 percent tip on food and wine is the way we do things in this country. It’s the only way people in the service industry earn money.”
Jay Inkpen, a waiter at New York’s Union Square Café, agreed: “At the end of the night, I report 18.5 percent of my sales, food or wine, as taxable income.” If guests don’t tip on the wine they bought, he’s hurting.
And one extra-smart friend, fellow Denver Post writer Ellen Sweets, summed it up as only she can: “Child, if you can afford the wine, you can afford the tip.”
She’s right, of course. A $40 bottle of wine merits an $8 tip, period. It’s just how we do things.
And it’s the right thing to do.
Dining critic Tucker Shaw can be reached at 303-820-1958 or at dining@denverpost.com.
