The Wine by the Glass Pricing Guide

By Rob Bruni, founder of OpsEdge Hospitality, twenty years running restaurants, bars, clubs and resorts. Updated November 2026.

Wine by the glass is often the highest-margin line on the list and the easiest one to lose money on without noticing. The bottle cost is known, the price looks generous, and the leak is quiet: half a bottle poured down the drain on Thursday, a heavy pour on Saturday, a glass price nobody has checked since the distributor raised the bottle cost. This guide shows how to price a glass with waste built in, how many pours you really get from a bottle, how to read the one number that decides your by-the-glass pour cost, and a free calculator to price your own list.

Why wine by the glass is easy to underprice

The traditional rule is that the first glass pays for the bottle: if the bottle costs $12, charge $12 for a glass and the other four pours are margin. On paper that is a 20 percent pour cost. In practice it is rarely 20 percent, for three reasons:

• Open bottles die. Most still wines are past their best two to three days after opening without a preservation system. Every glass left in a bottle that gets dumped is a glass you paid for and never sold.
• Pours drift. A 5 ounce pour that becomes 6 ounces on a busy night is a 20 percent increase in cost on every glass, and it cuts the bottle from five glasses to four.
• Bottle costs move. A glass priced on last year's invoice is priced on last year's cost. The pour cost guide covers how cost increases quietly push the percentage up.

That is why realistic by-the-glass pour cost runs 25 to 35 percent once waste is counted, the range we use in the beverage program guide. The aim of pricing is to land inside that range on purpose, with waste in the math, instead of landing there by accident.

Pours per bottle by pour size

A standard 750 ml bottle holds about 25.4 ounces. Divide by the pour size to get the pours in a bottle, then remember that the last half ounce is often sediment, spills or the taste the server pours to check the bottle.

Pick one pour size per glass type, write it on the list, and make it easy to hit: pour-line glasses, a measured carafe or a jigger for wine. If the glass is 16 ounces and the pour is 5, a free pour will be 6 or 7 every time because a 5 ounce pour looks small in a big glass.

The pricing formula, with waste built in

Price from the bottle cost, your target pour cost and the number of pours you realistically sell from each bottle, not the number the bottle holds:

Pours sold per bottle is the honest version of "pours in a bottle". It comes from your own numbers: glasses sold of that wine for the week (from the POS) divided by bottles used (opening count plus received minus closing count, from the bar inventory). A 5 ounce program that sells 4.5 pours per bottle is running well. Under 4 means bottles are dying open or pours are heavy.

Then round to a clean menu price. Most lists step in whole dollars ($11, $13, $15) and avoid prices ending in 99 cents, which read as retail.

Worked examples: house red, premium red and sparkling

Three wines from a full service list. The house red sells fast, so 4.5 pours per bottle is realistic. The premium red carries a slightly higher target, the sliding scale from the beverage guide applied to the glass: a lower percentage on the cheapest wine and more dollars on the better one. Sparkling loses its bubbles quickly, so it is priced on four pours sold.

Two things stand out. The house red at $11 makes about $8.33 a glass at a 24 percent pour cost, close to the old first-glass rule but with waste already counted. And the premium red makes more than $13 a glass at a higher percentage, which is the point of the sliding scale: percent margin is how you check the list, dollar margin is how you pay the rent.

Calculator: price your own list

Waste: the number that decides your pour cost

Keep the same $12 bottle and the same $11 glass, and change only how many pours you sell before the bottle is dumped:

Same wine, same price, and the pour cost runs from about 22 percent to 36 percent depending on what happens to the last third of the bottle. That is why the fixes for a high by-the-glass pour cost are mostly operational, not pricing:

• Date every open bottle with a sticker or a wax pencil, and pour the oldest first.
• Preserve what you open. Stoppers with vacuum pumps help for a day or two; inert gas systems and needle-through-the-cork systems keep a bottle for much longer and make a premium pour practical.
• Log what you dump. A simple waste line on the bar log (wine, ounces, reason) turns "we pour a lot down the drain" into a number.
• Use tired wine on purpose. A bottle on day three can go to staff tasting, a sauce or a sangria special before it goes down the drain, as long as it is logged as a transfer, not lost.
• Keep the list short enough to turn. Every wine by the glass needs to empty a bottle before it fades. If one wine sells two glasses a week, it belongs on the bottle list, not the glass list.

Building the by-the-glass list and price ladder

• Six to ten wines for most full service restaurants, covering a sparkling, two or three whites, a rosé in season and three or four reds.
• Step prices cleanly, for example $11, $13, $15 and $18. Big gaps are where guests trade down; tiny gaps make the cheapest glass the default.
• Sell every by-the-glass wine by the bottle too, so an open bottle always has a second way to sell. The by-the-bottle price is usually close to four glasses, which makes the bottle the better value for a table of two having a second glass.
• Offer a larger pour on a few wines, such as an 8 ounce glass or a 250 ml quartino, priced at the same pour cost. It raises the check without adding a bottle to the open list.
• Recost every quarter. When a bottle cost goes up a dollar, the formula tells you the new price, and the calculator shows what the old price is now really running at.

The weekly by-the-glass routine

1. Count open and full by-the-glass bottles at the weekly bar count.
2. Pull glasses sold per wine from the POS for the same week.
3. Work out pours sold per bottle for each wine and flag anything under 4 (5 ounce pour).
4. Read the waste log for the week and compare it to the gap.
5. Recheck any wine whose bottle cost changed, and reprice with the formula.
6. Once a quarter, drop the slowest wine and replace it, or move it to the bottle list.

Fifteen minutes a week keeps a by-the-glass program inside 25 to 35 percent. It also feeds straight into the weekly prime cost number, because beverage cost is part of it.

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