Restaurants

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Yet it seems wrong that wine has to bear the brunt of a restaurant's costs. Admittedly, food is marked up significantly too, often by a multiple of three. However, says Martin Lam, owner of Modern European restaurant Ransome's Dock, this is with good reason: 'The labour costs of making even a simple chicken dish soon add up. You buy a bird for £6.50, say, and portion it out, then make money on each part, but it has to pass through two or three people's hands. Paying a sommelier, storing a wine, having a cooling cabinet to keep it at the right temperature and glassware - all cost, but it's nothing like what you spend in a kitchen.'

Shipping and duty on wine is also more expensive in the UK than in France, Italy, Spain and Australia. These countries have large indigenous wine industries and so restaurants don't bring in so many wines from overseas. Furthermore, the whole process of importing wine tends to favour British supermarkets sourcing branded wines, rather than restaurants bringing in smaller, more individual producers. Transporting wine in bulk, whether it comes from France, Australia, South Africa or Chile, costs the least because it travels in huge containers. Wines from unusual parts of Spain and Italy have to be driven by lorry, passing through tolls and consuming petrol. So it's not the distance, but the amount of wine being shipped that counts.

Still, the overall cost of shipping on a case of wine - around £2 for a major brand, £4 for a lesser-known label - doesn't account for the increases currently operational in London. If food received the same treatment as wine, no one would eat out. 'Restaurants can't mark up a steak as much as a bottle of Mouton Rothschild,' says Bill Baker, owner of Bristol-based supplier Reid Wines, 'or they'd be empty within days.' Baker is probably right, but the current situation means there's a huge pricing imbalance in a meal; wine is so expensive that it costs too much to buy the right wine to match the food. Reid thinks there's a need for a change of attitude: 'The customer is as much to blame as the restaurateur. He or she is making an offer; people don't have to accept it.'

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