Beer gets all the attention at the stocktake because it's the biggest line. Wine leaks quieter. It dies standing up in the fridge door, a third of a bottle at a time, and because each individual bin is a splash rather than a keg, nobody writes it down. Count it properly for a month and most wet-led pubs find wine wastage running far ahead of what anyone would have guessed. Here's where it goes and how to stop it.
The open-bottle clock
Every bottle you open starts a timer, and the timer is shorter than most bar teams think. Wine Folly's storage guidance puts it like this:
| Style | Once opened |
|---|---|
| Sparkling | 1–3 days (tank-method fizz like Prosecco fades fastest) |
| Light white, sweet white, rosé | 5–7 days in the fridge |
| Full-bodied white (oaked Chardonnay etc.) | 3–5 days in the fridge |
| Red | 3–5 days, somewhere cool and dark |
| Fortified (port, sherry) | Up to 28 days |
| Bag-in-box | 2–3 weeks in the fridge |
Now hold that against your sales. A by-the-glass white that sells five glasses a week is a bottle taking longer to empty than it takes to oxidise. That's not a staff problem or a customer problem, it's a list problem: the wine should never have been on by the glass at that pace. Prosecco on a slow midweek is the worst offender, a £7 bottle that's flat by Thursday. This is why the fix starts with the list, not with a lecture.
The bottle arithmetic, and the law on measures
A 75cl bottle is six 125ml glasses, three 250ml glasses, or four 175ml glasses with 50ml left over. That stray 50ml matters: poured as a top-up it's an unpriced fifth of a glass gone with every fourth bottle, and kept it's a splash that gets binned. Decide which on purpose, because at volume it adds up either way.
The measures themselves aren't optional. Still wine by the glass must be sold in 125ml or 175ml, or multiples of them, through stamped glassware or a stamped measure, with carafes at 250ml, 500ml, 750ml or a litre. And the mandatory licensing conditions require the 125ml option to be available and customers made aware of it. Free-pouring wine "by eye" isn't generous, it's unmeasured stock loss with a compliance problem attached.
Corked bottles: rarer than the wastage book says
Genuine cork taint affects under 1% of bottles, per Wine Spectator's long-running estimate. One in a hundred and something. So if the same wine is being written off as corked most weeks, the odds say the wine isn't corked, it's cooked: stored warm or in sunlight, or open too long and oxidised, which reads similar on the nose to an unlucky cork. That's a storage and rotation fix, not a supplier complaint, though a real corked bottle should always go back to the supplier for credit rather than quietly down the sink.
Where the money actually goes
Do the sum on one binned glass. A house white costing £6.50 sells at, say, £5.50 for 175ml, which is £4.58 ex VAT against a per-glass cost of about £1.52. Bin one 175ml glass and you've lost £1.52 of stock; bin a third of a bottle, the classic fridge-door death, and it's £2.17. Neither sounds like much, which is exactly why nobody logs it. But a pub binning the equivalent of two bottles a week is £676 a year of cost price in the sink, and the pub that bins two open bottles usually also loses a short-poured glass here and an unlogged top-up there. Illustrative figures, your list will differ, but run your own version and it's rarely smaller.
The stocktake sees all of this only if you count wine properly, which means part bottles by weight, not by squint. Wine sits around 0.99 g/ml, so scales that weigh your spirits (the part-bottle method) do wine too, and suddenly the fridge door is a number instead of an impression.
Six fixes that actually move it
- Match the by-the-glass list to turnover. Every wine on by the glass must sell fast enough to empty a bottle inside its window. If it can't, it's bottle-only, or it's bag-in-box for the house pour with its 2–3 week life.
- Date-dot every opened bottle. A pen and a sticker. No dot, no argument about how old it is.
- Sell the last glass, don't bin it. A short measure left in the bottle can be a spritzer, a cooking splash for the kitchen, or offered as a 125ml. It cannot become revenue from inside the bin.
- Stopper properly. A sparkling stopper on every open fizz bottle, vacuum stoppers on the whites. Cheap kit against a £7 bottle.
- Log every bin in millilitres. An open-bottle bin belongs in the wastage log like any keg or cask event, or the count shows unexplained loss and the wrong conversation starts.
- Weigh part bottles at the count. Same scales, same method as spirits. It's the difference between knowing your wine wastage and guessing it.
Get those running and wine stops being the quiet line. The variance either shrinks, or it stops being mysterious, and a variance you can explain is a solved problem. If your whole count still runs on a clipboard and vibes, the DIY stocktake guide is the place to start.
Sources
- Wine Folly, How long does an open bottle of wine last — open-bottle life by style, including bag-in-box at 2–3 weeks.
- BBPA, Weights and Measures guidance — still wine by the glass in 125ml or 175ml or multiples, stamped glassware or measures, carafes at 250ml/500ml/750ml/1 litre.
- Home Office, mandatory licensing conditions — the 125ml wine measure must be available and customers made aware.
- Wine Spectator — genuine cork taint affects under 1% of bottles.
- Per-glass and per-year loss figures are the author's arithmetic on illustrative prices, flagged in the text. Wine density ~0.99 g/ml is the author's working figure for weighing.