There’s a new millennial focused alcoholic drinks company called Haus that’s using very slick marketing to try to change the world of alcohol. One of the ways it sells itself is that it is “less alcohol than liquor, it’s lighter than beer, easier to understand than wine”. I’m sure Haus has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on branding and marketing, and since this snippet appears in the 3rd block of its homepage, we can assume that, yes, wine is complicated.

In many ways, that’s why I’m starting Somm. I love wine but my friends don’t as much. And I want to help change that. I want more people to drink wine, and I frankly want them to drink better and more expensive wines. We want to give people the confidence to spend money on a bottle of wine. I think if people are confident about what they are buying, they’ll buy more of it, and more expensive ones.

I’ll give you a graph right off the bat. It is “somm.ai” after all (to be honest, it’s because somm.com was already taken, but we’ll get it one day). Here’s a look at the average restaurant mark-up in the US for about the most popular 1000 wines. These are specific wines, so some of them are really expensive (like the one for $7200, feel free to email me the guess on which one that is).

You can see quite clearly that most wines are marked up between 2 and 3 times, but some wines are marked up a lot more than other wines. (By the way, there’s nothing wrong with marking up a wine at a restaurant, as long as it’s done in a respectful way. It costs a lot of money for a restaurant to pay for the labour and real estate to be able to serve you that bottle of wine.)

More interestingly, notice that more expensive wines are marked up less. Well that makes sense too. It costs the restaurant the same amount of labour and real estate to be able to serve a more expensive wine as a less expensive wine. Also, a lot of restaurants have corkage policies that are a flat dollar price. Mark up an expensive wine too much, and people will just bring their own wines.

The other funny reason why sometimes expensive wines are marked up less is because of who’s doing the marking up. A lot of times, the person who is in charge of pricing is a person who really loves wine, and he or she would rather sell an expensive wine than a less expensive wine. Not just because then you get to taste the more expensive wines (yes sommeliers get to try your wine) but also because it’s just more fun to sell better wine.

But here’s a little fact that I think is pretty interesting. So from the graph, it seems like the white wines are a little cheaper than the red wines. Maybe that’s not that surprising. But what’s harder to tell is that they are also lower on the markups, by about 5%. White wines in the graph are about 35% cheaper. That goes against what we said earlier, about cheaper wines being marked up more, so that makes for a very interesting result.

The reason though, is also quite simple. Think about big, expensive, expense-account dinners, and what kind of wines they are getting for their fancy steak dinners. So that’s the first Somm takeaway then. Buy white wines at restaurants.