Your list has forty bins. The one that outsells everything else is the second cheapest red, at £26, and you know exactly why it sells: nobody wants to order the cheapest.
It costs you £6.40 a bottle. You are turning it four times a week. And the Barolo at £62 that you were proud to list has moved twice since March, which means you have £180 of stock sitting in the cellar earning nothing while the £26 red pays the rent.
Percentage margin is the wrong instruction to give yourself
Most lists are built by multiplying. Take the trade price, apply a multiple, add VAT, round. It is quick and it produces a list that is internally consistent and commercially daft.
Work it through with real numbers. A bottle costs £6 net. You price it at £24 on the list, which is £20 net of VAT at the standard rate. Your cash gross profit is £14 and your gross margin is 70%.
Now take a bottle costing £15 net. Applying the same 70% target puts it at £50 net, £60 on the list, and nobody in a neighbourhood restaurant is buying it. Price it instead at £45 on the list, which is £37.50 net. Your margin has dropped to 60%, which looks worse on a report. Your cash gross profit is £22.50, which is £8.50 more than the cheap bottle produced.
You pay your staff in pounds. You pay your rent in pounds. A list optimised for percentage systematically steers customers towards the bottles that give you the least money per sale, then congratulates you on the percentage.
The usual fix is a sliding scale: a higher multiple at the bottom of the list, compressing towards a smaller multiple plus a fixed cash amount at the top. The effect is that the £15 bottle and the £30 bottle both return a sensible cash figure, and the gap between your entry price and your mid range stops being a cliff.
The duty changed and strength now drives the bill
Since 1 August 2023 alcohol duty has been charged by reference to the litres of pure alcohol in the product rather than by product category and volume band. For products between 8.5% and 22% ABV the rate was set at £28.50 per litre of pure alcohol from that date. Rates are uprated at fiscal events, so check the current figure, but the structure is what matters.
The structure means strength is now a cost line. A 75cl bottle at 12.5% ABV contains 0.09375 litres of pure alcohol. At £28.50 that is about £2.67 of duty. The same bottle at 14.5% contains 0.10875 litres, which is about £3.10. Forty-three pence a bottle, before your supplier's margin and before VAT.
There was a temporary easement that treated wines between 11.5% and 14.5% as if they were 12.5%, which ended on 1 February 2025. Since then the duty follows the actual strength on the label, which is why big ripe reds from warm climates have moved up relative to lighter European wines, and why a list with a deliberate lean towards 12% to 13% wines is now a margin decision as well as a stylistic one.
None of this is a reason to list wine you do not believe in. It is a reason to know, when you are comparing two possible house reds, that the 14.5% one is carrying a cost the 12.5% one is not.
By the glass is where the money leaks
A 75cl bottle gives six measures at 125ml, three at 250ml, and four and a bit at 175ml. That bit is the problem.
Wine by the glass in licensed premises must be sold in specified quantities: 125ml, 175ml, or multiples of those, under the Weights and Measures (Specified Quantities) (Unwrapped Bread and Intoxicating Liquor) Order 1988. There is also a mandatory licensing condition, in force since October 2010, requiring that smaller measures are available and that customers are made aware of them. You cannot quietly sell only 250ml glasses because they are more profitable.
At 175ml you get 4.28 glasses from a bottle. If your staff pour generously, and untrained staff always do, you get four. That fifth part-glass is between 10% and 20% of the bottle's revenue, and it disappears without appearing on any report. Lined glasses or a measured pourer recover it, and both are cheap.
Then there is oxidation. A bottle open for three days is not saleable at the price on the list. Count how many by-the-glass wines you offer against how fast each one actually moves, and cut the list until every open bottle finishes within its window. Four whites and four reds that turn is a better list than twelve that do not. Preservation systems and inert gas extend the window and are worth their cost on expensive wines only.
Price by the glass from the bottle, not the other way round. If a bottle is £30 on the list and you sell 175ml glasses, four glasses at £8.50 returns £34 for the same bottle, which covers the wastage and the pour variance. Selling that glass at £6.50 returns £26 and loses you money against selling the bottle whole.
The second cheapest bottle is where you decide the list works
There is a long-standing belief in the trade that the second cheapest wine on any list outsells its neighbours, because customers do not want to look mean and do not want to overpay. Whether the effect is as strong as the folklore says is arguable, but it costs you nothing to assume it is and to put your best value bottle in that position.
That is the single highest-leverage change most lists can make. Do not put your worst wine second. Put the bottle with the best combination of quality and cash margin second, negotiate hard on it because you will buy it by the pallet, and let the position do the work.
Two other structural choices are worth making deliberately.
- Keep the list short enough that a member of staff can describe every wine on it. A guest who is helped to trade up by one step is worth more than any pricing formula, and that only happens with staff who have tasted what they are selling.
- Review the list against actual sales twice a year, not by what you like. Anything that has not moved in six months is cash sitting in a cellar. Sell it by the glass, put it on a specials card, or take the loss and get the money back into stock that turns.
The number to watch is not your gross margin percentage on wine. It is cash gross profit per bottle sold, multiplied by bottles sold, against the value of stock you are holding to achieve it. A list that returns a lower percentage on faster stock turn will beat a prouder one every time.
Where this shows up in the game
Restaurants and fine dining are part of Business Baron's full game, and a pub costs nothing to run in the free game. Gross margin is the number the game keeps in front of you, and supplier prices move as the years pass. A list priced on percentages steers customers towards the bottles that earn you least, in the game as outside it.