Every once in a while I’ll have a conversation about the cost of whisky compared to wine. I decided I’d try to do some actual calculations based on prices at my local shops.
I’ve created a Google spreadsheet (link below) with scotch and wine prices from three of my local shops: BevMo, K&L Wines (Redwood City), and Beltramos. All three have online stores, so I collected the data from their web pages. For Scotch, I collected all the prices they have listed. For wine, I collected only red and white wine prices. I then averaged the bottle prices and did some calculations.
Findings – Price per Glass
The bottom line: Assuming 5 glasses per wine bottle and 12 glasses for scotch bottle, the price per glass between wine and single malt is essentially equal. This is especially the case with K&L Wines, whose average price per glass is only 4 cents apart between wine and scotch. Bevmo skews toward higher priced scotch, and Beltramos skews towards higher priced wine.
Caveat: All these numbers include the higher end bottles, although I have trimmer the extremely high and extremely low priced bottles.
The Numbers
- Bevmo Scotch vs Wine
- price per bottle: $60.41 vs $18.66
- price per glass: $5.03 vs $3.73
- prices collected: 183 vs 1810
- K&L Scotch vs Wine
- price per bottle: $120.28 vs $49.89
- price per glass: $10.02 vs $9.98
- prices collected: 168 vs 2726
- Beltramos Scotch vs Wine
- price per bottle: $103.26 vs $61.82
- price per glass: $8.61 vs $12.36
- prices collected: 173 vs 1901
Notable Things
- All three stores have about 175 different bottles of scotch, and about 2000 bottles of wine.
- Bevmo’s average price is lowest, most likely because they carry a lot of the “cheap stuff”.
- K&L’s average glass price for scotch and wine is essentially the same (almost exactly $10).
- K&L Wines’ average scotch and wine prices are twice that of Bevmo ($120 vs $60 for scotch, $49 vs $18 for wine). This makes sense, as K&L is most likely stocking a lot of higher quality goods.
- Bevmo stocks higher priced scotch than wine (~34% more per glass), and Beltramo’s is the opposite – their wine is a higher price (~30% more per glass).
- Interestingly Beltramos has a higher wine price than K&L. Beltramos may be stocking more high-priced wine than anyone, perhaps.
Check out the spreadsheet here.