I was cleaning up my desk when I came across the picture at the bottom of this blog entry. The picture is of a professional sports team’s bar tab after they won the league’s championship. The service fee was 20% of their bar tab. Twenty percent doesn’t seem like something worth blogging about, but this team ended up paying $25,000 service fee for 2 hours of just drinking and not eating a single bite of food. Professional sports teams do crazy things after winning championships so having a giant bar tab is not unusual. What was unusual was the team in addition to drinking lots of beer and whiskey, drank one bottle of very rare champagne that cost $100,000. The waitress didn’t open the bottle or serve it, that was done by the players themselves. However, by having one single bottle of champagne the players’ tip jumped from a $5,000 service fee to a $25,000 service fee. The huge increase led me to wonder, “Is there a limit to how much a person or group should tip?” Continue reading Is There a Limit to How Much a Person Should Tip?
Champagne
What Size Champagne Should We Buy For The Holidays?
The weather is cold, the semester is ending and it is time for some of us to pick up Champagne for the holidays. Champagne at this time of year comes in all sizes of bottles from a small 1/3 of a liter, good for two people toasting the New Year, to giant 15 liter bottles, good for a huge crowd. In general when buying food the rule is simple, “bigger is always cheaper.”
As a special treat for Thanksgiving I purchased a giant Jeroboam bottle of red wine. A Jeroboam is 3 liters, which is four regular sized bottles of wine. The Jeroboam turned peoples heads when I brought it out. I was thinking maybe a giant bottle of Champagne for New Years Eve might be just the thing.
I went to Sherry-Lehmann‘s website (see one of the screen shots below) to price big bottles of Champagne since wines shops in my neighborhood don’t stock the giant bottles. Sherry-Lehmann is a large wine shop in New York City. They have prices on almost every single size of Veuve-Clicquot Yellow Label available which is convenient for comparing an identical product that only varies in size. The result of a few minutes cruising their website was the following table:
| Size in Liters | Price in US $ | Name | Price Per Liter |
| 0.375 | $26.95 | Half | $71.87 |
| 0.75 | $45.95 | Standard | $61.27 |
| 1.5 | $114.95 | Magnum | $76.63 |
| 3 | $395.00 | Jeroboam | $131.67 |
| 9 | $1,375.00 | Salmanazar | $152.78 |
| 12 | $1,995.00 | Balthazar | $166.25 |
| 15 | $2,395.00 | Nebuchadnezzar | $159.67 |
The table shows that the cheapest Champagne on a price per liter basis is the regular “Standard” size bottle. Unlike when buying meat, fruits and vegetables, bigger is NOT better when buying Champagne. As a matter of fact, the bigger the bottle the larger the price premium! One 15 liter Nebuchadnezzar costs $2,395. Buying 20 bottles of the standard 3/4 liter size, which gives you the same amount of Champagne, costs only $919, a savings of almost $1,500.
The lesson of this blog post is simple. During the holidays when shopping for wine don’t buy the big size. Stick with the regular sized bottle and spend the money you save on something else.
PS: For those of you who are not convinced by the economics, trying to pour wine out of a Jeroboam into a small wine glass at Thanksgiving proved to be very hard. We ended up pouring most of the red wine into water pitchers so that no one made a huge mess. The Jeroboam makes a great statement when you walk into the room carrying it, but is a real pain in the neck to actually use.
