This Bordeaux Wine Dinner Is The Best Deal of the Year—Maybe the Decade

No, it’s not a typo: Origo Club + Château Branaire Ducru = $100. All in.

Wine dinners are a thing these days. And, for the most part, they’re a blast with the one downside being they’re usually pricey affairs. The price isn’t unreasonable—you have a multi-course meal and multi-pairings of usually tough-to-source wine—but there’s no getting away from the tally at the end.Which is why I thought it was a typo when I saw that Woody Wu of Richmond’s Origo Club was bringing in François-Xavier Maroteaux, the managing director of the famed Saint-Julien Bordeaux estate Château Branaire Ducru, for a wine dinner on February 13. The price? $100. That must be for the wine, I thought, and given that the recent vintage is $140 a bottle at Marquis right now, that seemed pretty cheap.But nope. That price is all in: food and wine. And tax. And gratuity. That means it’s actually more like $75. I’m not shitting you. Origo Club.Something’s wrong here. Wu is quickly making a name for himself as one of the city’s most passionate wine-loving restaurant owners, but there’s passion and then there’s….$100. Let’s put this in perspective: a normal, well-priced wine dinner featuring, say, a mid-level California winery would be a good deal at $175, plus tax and tip, so more like $230. A winery of the stature of Branaire Ducru? $250 easy, so more like $330. Not to belabour the point, but that’s 3.3 times the price of this dinner.I think you know what to do. Menu and tickets are here.