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Find coupons for wine corkage -- Corkpons -- online

A sommelier displays a bottle of Cappella 2006 red wine. A new feature called Corkpon allows restaurants to offer discounts to customers on corkage fees.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
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CorkageFeed, a website that maps restaurants that offer wine corkage for a fee, or sometimes — though rarely — for nothing, has a new thing going. It’s called Corkpon, or a coupon for corkage.

Corkpons, as explained by CorkageFeed, are created by restaurateurs and bar owners as a way to attract customers. To find Corkpons and corkage information at restaurants near you, go to CorkageFeed.com and plug in your ZIP Code, the restaurant name or the city. If a restaurant is featuring a Corkpon, you’ll see a “Corkpon offer” button on the listing. Redeem the offer by printing it or showing it to your waiter on your smartphone.

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FOR THE RECORD

An earlier version of this post credited the Corkpons (corkage coupons) to the app and website www.corkagefee.com. Corkpons can be found at www.corkagefeed.com, a site unaffiliated with www.corkagefee.com.

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Sounds great in theory, but on Friday morning, clicking the “Free corkage today” button yielded no Los Angeles restaurants. Clicking “Corkpon offers” doesn’t give up the name of a restaurant either, although there was one Thursday. It stands to reason that restaurateurs would want to lure customers in via discounted corkage fees on weekdays and slower nights, not on the weekends.

Corkpons are a great idea, but it looks like Los Angeles restaurateurs haven’t caught on to the concept yet. The site is new and promises to be much more useful as businesses and users add corkage fees to more of the Southern California restaurant listings. San Francisco listings are much more built out because the app’s headquarters are in the Bay area.

If you’re the type who checks websites only sporadically, join CorkageFeed’s mailing list to get alerts of new promotions near you. That may be the least frustrating way to find out about Corkpons and other deals as the website grows.

(A tip of the hat to @ReverseWineSnob for tweeting about this.)

Follow @sirenevirbila on Twitter for more on food and wine.

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