Most very fancy restaurants allow you to bring your own wine, but they still need to make money, so they charge you a fee to remove the cork and pour it for you.

Basically, he's joking about charging a fee for preparing the beverage she brought 😁

not that i can even drink wine

Because of your drinking problem?

Ayyyy I do this a lot if I don't know the place. I've spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what I like and have a collection to match my preferences.

If they have the styles and regions I like I order off menu, if not I got mine. $30 corkage is reasonable for a decent restaurant, I know a dive bar that does $10 and a bunch of us go there for snacks and to bust out bottles to share.

All good bottles should be shared.

If you think about it, there are hundreds of thousands of combinations of wine labels and vintages from thousands of producers. Some people who collect the wine and store it at home will want to enjoy the wine they have with a professionally prepared meal, and will bring that wine to a restaurant, and enjoy the entire service aspect of it (pouring into nice glasses, etc.).

It doesn't make much sense for ordinary bottles of wine. So the people who do this usually bring special, hard to find, significantly aged, or sentimental bottles. And because the restaurant still provides the service of opening and pouring the wine into nice glasses that they'll clean, there's usually a per bottle charge added to the bill.

So it's not super common, just also not super rare, either.

Sometimes people will bring a bottle from a particular year (year they got married on a big anniversary date) or will have some other particular sentimental reasoning for this, so it’s not very often.

I've only seen it in practice when someone is throwing a large party and wants to bring their own cheaper wine. It can even be the exact same wine.

Paying the full restaurant markup on the wine can be excessive if you hold a wedding for 70 people and if you can find it much cheaper from tax free or bulk purchase. It would still make sense to pay the corkage fee then.

Some municipalities do not grant liquor licenses to restaurants so BYOB is the loophole.

You've never heard of a BYO?

PSA: Don't let mother's milk turn vintage

Its something restaurants charge when you bring your own booze. Often times when something like a wedding rents out a whole restaurant and wants to bring their own stuff, the restaurant charges a corkage fee.

Most charge an exorbitant fee to incentivize getting the booze from them and it leads to situations, where a party pays 30€ to serve a 8€ bottle of rum.

It's when restaurants or wine tastings let you bring your own wine but open it for you and charge for that