Bringing Wine on Board

[shark5]

Can anyone tell me if Celebrity will allow me to bring wine onboard during embarkation?

I know that Carnival will but have never been on a Celebrity cruise and have booked the Infinity for November to Hawaii.

 

Thanks

sharkman

[fireguy091]

yes... :D

[geoherb]

We brought several bottles. There's a $15 corkage charge per bottle if you want it served to you in the restaurant. There's no charge for you to enjoy it in your cabin.

[shark5]

excellent.. thanks

[Lsimon]

Yes...in fact:

Room steward will bring you wine glasses, ice bucket, corkscrew, etc. on request. We had room steward make sure there were always 4 glasses available in room every afternoon. We found it was best to arrange these to just be there since the steward was sometimes busy when we wanted glasses and it would take a little longer then. You can also have steward or room service bring you things to go with it like bar nuts & snacks or cheese - and I beleive these are all complimentary (or included depending on your point of view).

 

Room steward will also have it taken to the dining room so it will be chilled there, if appropriate, and waiting for you for dinner. No corkage fee in your room, only dining room.

[canderson]

Can anyone tell me if Celebrity will allow me to bring wine onboard during embarkation?

I know that Carnival will but have never been on a Celebrity cruise and have booked the Infinity for November to Hawaii.

 

Thanks

sharkman

 

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As for taking wine aboard -- no problem. We took 8 bottles along for our recent 11 nt. trip on the Summit for 4. Didn't last long! As reported, there's a $15 corkage charge in the dining room..

 

Rather than having you ambling into the restaurant with bottles under your arms, the "correct" procedure is to write your cabin and table number on the bottles, and hand them over to your cabin steward for delivery to the dining room. The wine steward will assure that it is held at an appropriate temperature until dinner. Since this typically means an extra run for your assistant steward, be a sport and check the dinner menu early and give them your bottles as early as you are able. I liked to try to assure they had them by 5:00 so as not to interrupt them while they were working over the cabins of those at early seating.

 

Note about wine on Celebrity M-Class ships. Do NOT be bashful about asking to see and order from the specialty restaurant wine list when seated in the main dining room. It's a more complete list with some interesting selections that you won't be seeing on the regular dining room wine list. It's nice if you can let the wine steward know the day ahead, though, if you know the entree schedule. Saves them a run down to the other cellar area.

 

Another nice feature -- if you don't finish a bottle (yours or theirs) at dinner, and it's got the wherewithall to spend an overnight, your wine steward will be happy to store it for you until dinner the next evening. I've even had a few somewhat raw cabernets that actually benefitted from the experience.

 

My recollection is that Celebrity is charging about 1.5X retail, so they aren't sticking it to you. That said, feel free to bring along anything special to you. As an example, we like (and still have) '97 Silver Oak (Alexander), and a variety of 1990 German TBA and BA (dessert wines). Can't find anything quite like either of those on the lists.

[Leejnd4]

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LOL! Now that's an efficient way to handle these questions. Bravo! :D

 

LeeAnne

[canderson]

LOL! Now that's an efficient way to handle these questions. Bravo! :D

 

LeeAnne

I've actually started to build up a "portfolio" of this stuff! Need laundry and dry-cleaning prices? Information on what the wine steward gets from the corkage charges? Descriptions of FV cabins? It took me a while to wise up, but I'm getting the hang of this. Either people don't read to page 2, or are unaware of the advanced search options.

[ali-ali-oh]

Canderson

That really made me laugh.

I have to be honest, although fairly new to this, even I think "not again" when I see the same old questions again and again and AGAIN. I have to admire the patience of you guys who keep helping out the poor idiots, like myself, who just think "Wow, what a great forum" and haven't quite got to grips with the boards and worked out the search facilities.

Patience is a virtue as they say.

[Char]

It's OK to ask the questions again because the answers might have changed since the last time it was posted. Celebrity makes changes every now and then and we need to keep up with the current information.

[GaryThePhotog]

And if it is the same, isn't it like "almost" cheating your wine steward. As an example, I can get a 1.5L of Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio for about $8.50, a wine my wife seems to like quite nicely. Add the $15 corkage fee and price per glass still comes to approx. $3., about 1/3 the cost of an average Pinot from the list. Has anyone brought a 1.5L bottle to the table and, if so, what has been your experience?

[Char]

And if it is the same, isn't it like "almost" cheating your wine steward. As an example, I can get a 1.5L of Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio for about $8.50, a wine my wife seems to like quite nicely. Add the $15 corkage fee and price per glass still comes to approx. $3., about 1/3 the cost of an average Pinot from the list. Has anyone brought a 1.5L bottle to the table and, if so, what has been your experience?

My personal experience has been that most people bring good quality wines to the dining room and drink the $8.50 bottles in their cabins. I haven't noticed any large bottles of wine being served in the dining room. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened~~only that I never saw any.

[canderson]

And if it is the same, isn't it like "almost" cheating your wine steward. As an example, I can get a 1.5L of Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio for about $8.50, a wine my wife seems to like quite nicely. Add the $15 corkage fee and price per glass still comes to approx. $3., about 1/3 the cost of an average Pinot from the list. Has anyone brought a 1.5L bottle to the table and, if so, what has been your experience?

As noted earlier this week, you could bring a 4.5l Jeroboam with you and it would still be $15. But as Char notes, the wine steward doesn't do very well that way.

 

Of the $15, the steward keeps $5. So your corkage charge equates to the purchase of a $33 bottle of wine at 15% gratuity. If you were bringing 1.5l along, you'd need to have purchased $66 of wine for your wine steward to break even on the deal, so an extra tip is in order.