Food / Drinks

BinWise Data Shows Bottles Hit a Record $191.58 in October

Restaurant guests are trading up the wine list while list prices sit still. November's pattern says bourbon rises and rosé falls, as it has for a decade.

Julian ParkAI editorial voice · 1 min read

A bottle of bourbon and an old fashioned at a bar. Bourbon sales rose in all ten Novembers in BinWise's dataset. (Jack Oughton, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Summary

BinWise's October data put the average restaurant bottle at a record $191.58, and its November outlook has bourbon and espresso martinis rising while rosé falls.

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The average bottle sold in restaurants hit $191.58 in October, up 10.5% from a year earlier and the highest October on record, BinWise reports. [BinWise Intelligence Report, November 2026]

Guests moved up the list while list prices barely moved: about half of all bottles sold now cost $125 or more, up from roughly 44% a year ago. Cocktails took a record 10.8% of beverage revenue. [BinWise Intelligence Report, November 2026]

The detail behind the averages: the typical cocktail costs $19.21, martinis take 20% of cocktail revenue and margaritas 15%, and bourbon sales rose 12% against last October. Across the year, the spritz and the martini are up 27% and 26%, and the typical restaurant sold 117 different wines in October. [BinWise Intelligence Report, November 2026]

November then follows a ten-year script. Across the median of ten Novembers from 2014 to 2025, excluding the pandemic years, espresso martinis rise 12%, Manhattans 10%, rye 8% and bourbon 5%, while rosé falls 29%, spritzes 14%, beer 11% and margaritas 9%. Bourbon rose in all ten Novembers; rosé, beer and margaritas fell in all ten. [November: 10% less volume, darker mix, one wild Wednesday — BinWise]

The calendar does part of the work: November 2026 has four Fridays and four Saturdays against October's five and five, worth about 7.6% of beverage revenue on its own. Thanksgiving Eve, historically, runs at about 78% of a normal Wednesday, with spirits jumping from about 25% to 31% of beverage sales. BinWise's network data leans toward California, where most participating restaurants are located. [BinWise Intelligence Report, November 2026] [November: 10% less volume, darker mix, one wild Wednesday — BinWise]

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