A friend highlighted to me that The Botanist (a self-described “pub for people with great taste” in Bristol) had launched a ‘Bottomless Bubbles’ menu on Friday and Saturday nights: 2 courses plus bottomless Prosecco.
This deal will set you back £29.95, but what caught my attention was that there’s an alternative offer for those not keen on alcohol—the same food, but with unlimited soft drinks for £17.95. That means that the premium charged for Prosecco is £12.
I asked the friend if he knew what sort of Prosecco would be served (the drinks menu referenced in the T&Cs doesn’t mention a brand) and he thought it might be Canti. He might be wrong, but let’s just roll with it.
According to MySupermarket, the best deal on a 75cl bottle of Canti is currently £9 at Sainsbury’s. This means that the £12 premium for Prosecco could buy you 1⅓ bottles at the supermarket—which comes to exactly 1 litre.
In other words, to be getting better value from the bottomless deal, you’d need to drink more than a litre of Prosecco—and you’ve only got 2 hours in which to accomplish this task.
If we gloss over the fact that a litre of Canti contains 11 units of alcohol (the NHS recommends not regularly exceeding 14 units per week), you’d need to be drinking at a rate greater than 8⅓ ml/min for the full 2 hours to be getting ‘better value’. Although many people could probably manage that, I’m fairly certain that the ensuing hangover would ruin the experience.
The conclusion then is this: if you want to drink an obscene amount of Prosecco and are happy with the consequences then go for it. For everyone else, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll drink enough to justify the price premium. You’ll pay £12 extra for an alluring ‘deal’ but drink much less than that in Prosecco—the difference goes straight into the profit column.