Re: Lyle
Our guests are certainly drinking less wines at the $85 and up price point! I feel like this is due to two factors:
1-The economy sucks! While our neighborhood is anomalous as it is OLD San Francisco money, people are still shelling out less cash.
2-We moved our "$60 and Under" pages to the front of their respective White and Red sections of the list, while before they were at the end of each section and not mentioned on the Table of Contacts, which while I wish I could say was an honest oversight was most likely due to dastardly Sommelier omission, but hey, these things happen

No more reading thru 28 pages of reds from around the world to find the list of solely cheaper wines. So, while every wine on the $60 page was also listed in its respective section (i.e. St. Joseph or California Cabernet), you still had to look thru all of those pages. With the $60 pages at the forefront, a lot of people don't even bother to look at all of the other great wines, many of which are $70 or $80 but from great small producers! I feel the current system is actually a disservice to the guest as it limits their exposure to some great stuff, and I also feel it hurts our (and MY!) bottom line because it makes it so damned easy to choose that Susana Balbo Malbec (the current bane of my existence)!
Care to guess at the reason for moving those $60 pages? YELP! I don't know if that cruddy homonculous of self-important wannabe gourmand blather is big in New York, but here in Northern Cali we're all victim to it. Three or four posts by people claiming we have no selections under $70 or $100 (Hogwash! literally hundreds of wines less than $100) and the owners get jittery. Which is understandable, as word of mouth and PR are of course essential to business.
To be honest, I'm conflicted on the whole thing. Of course I want to sell bigger bottles, I gotta keep myself in Tecate somehow (!), but I also really love selling great wines to people, but I can only sling so much Ladoix and Fixin! On the other hand, I want the business to be succesful, and I understand that we all must take a hit right now, and perhaps the good PR and goodwill gained from the immediate, easy access to these wines has an intangible worth that exceeds the drop in average bottle cost sales right now.
On the same thread, I was thinking about this topic all night as I opened bottle after bottle of Cheverny...It would be an interesting experiment to move those pages back to the rear of their sections and see what happens. My guess is an increase in average bottle cost, but I wonder if it would result in less bottles sold, lower gross sales and perhaps a resumption of online grumbling about prices. I'll let you know if I'm able to enact this, as it would be quite interesting...
To address the second half of your question, people are generally pretty adventurous when I recommend ANY bottle they perceive as a value. So while the $100 Hoffstatter Lagrein is a real tuff sell right now, the $45 Chinon blanc goes over quite well (tho for the life of me I can't friggin move the cheap and yummy Torrette. C'mon people, Val d'Aoste wines are lovely!).
This is a much bigger issue on Fridays and Saturdays, which are our BIG Bridge and Tunnel (or I guess I should say Bridge and Bridge, ha!) nights. So tonight, us two somms had to really grind it out, while a Tuesday night would generate similar sales, but in more expensive, Old World wines, in contrast to tonights New World lovefest. The best bottle of the night was an 04 Ramonet Les Ruchottes, which was just smashing. I'm in love with 04 White Burgundy. The 1990 Chateau Margaux corkage was nice, after about 2 hours in the decanter. Having finally gathered a reasonable sample size, I feel justified in saying that Chateau Margaux is my least favorite of the First Growths (although sometimes Mouton holds this position). I guess this is a topic for another time (and another website, as I don't think the big boys of the Left Bank exactly qualify as Garagistes!!!).
Cheers!