What to know before buying wine en primeur
A practical buyer guide to allocations, risks, fees, and when en primeur actually makes sense.
Read guideGuides
Practical wine guides for buyers, hosts, and collectors
Short, useful articles built around real wine buying and planning questions, with direct links to the calculators that help you act on them.
Restaurant wine markup explained: what’s normal and what’s excessive?
A practical benchmark guide for judging list pricing instead of reacting to one bottle in isolation.
Read guideRestaurant corkage fee guide: when BYO saves money
A direct guide for comparing corkage fees against list pricing without guesswork.
Read guideUK wine duty per bottle in 2026
A current-duty guide with worked bottle examples for common ABVs.
Read guideUK wedding wine costs: corkage, sale-or-return, and supermarket deals
A practical buying guide for comparing venue packages, outside wine, and return terms.
Read guideHow much wine for 100 guests in the UK
A direct planning guide for one of the most common wedding wine search queries.
Read guideHow UK en primeur duty and VAT actually work
Understand in-bond pricing, duty, VAT, delivery, and why per-case comparisons can be misleading.
Read guideHow much wine for a wedding reception
Translate guest count, duration, and wine mix into bottle totals and a realistic budget range.
Read guideCorkage vs restaurant wine markup
Decide when bringing your own bottle is rational and when the list is the better value.
Read guideWhat you'll find here
Each guide explains a specific wine buying or planning question in plain terms, then points you to the calculator that helps you turn the answer into a decision.
The focus is practical: cost comparison, tax and duty, restaurant pricing, wedding planning, and the mistakes that make wine decisions look cheaper or simpler than they really are.
How the guides are used
Some readers arrive because they want a direct answer first and a calculator second. Others already know the question and need help translating it into an editable model. The guides are written to bridge that gap: enough context to make the numbers intelligible, without turning the site into a generic wine magazine.
How to choose the right guide first
If you are buying wine, start with the landed-cost and duty guides before using a calculator. If you are planning an event, start with the wedding guides so the guest assumptions make sense. If you are looking at a restaurant list, use the corkage and markup guides together, because the better choice depends on both the fee and the list.
The goal is not to turn every wine decision into a spreadsheet. It is to make the expensive or easily missed assumptions visible enough that a quick calculation becomes useful.
How the guides support the calculators
The calculators give a number quickly, but the guides explain the judgment around that number: what to compare, which assumption usually changes the result, and when a calculation should be treated as only a first pass. Start with the calculator when you know the inputs, or start with a guide when the decision itself is still unclear.
If a guide seems too broad, open the linked calculator and change one assumption at a time. That is usually the fastest way to see which part of the decision matters: tax, bottle count, corkage, serving size, storage time, or resale fees.
Over time, the guide library should make the site more useful than a set of isolated forms. Each article adds context, examples, and caveats so a visitor can understand both the number and the decision behind it.