The Après Index 2026–27.

Summer prices its coast in public; winter answers the telephone. When we priced the Mediterranean's sunbeds, 34 of 77 famous clubs printed a rate. The Alps, we can now report, print their wine and hide their chairs: across 70 famous terraces, huts and mountain clubs from Courchevel to St Moritz, with Aspen along for comparison, we found exactly two published prices for the right to sit down, and eleven beautifully printed prices for a mug of hot wine that runs from £5.51 in a Verbier forest to £15.42 on the Courchevel snow-front. This is the winter beat of the house price census: the Vin Chaud Index, the day-pass anchors already published for 2026-27, and the champagne parade cartes, in their own money and in pounds.

The house rules apply unchanged: a price enters the charts only if the venue or its operator published it, on a menu PDF, a rate card, a tariff bulletin or an official page; guide figures stay in the register marked for what they are, and nobody was telephoned. Winter adds two disciplines. First, currency: prices stay as printed, in euros, francs or dollars, and are compared in sterling at the ECB reference fixings of 4 August 2026, which are stored in the register itself (£1 buys €1.17, CHF 1.09, $1.34). The franc is why Switzerland reads dear before a cork moves.

Second, the season label. This is an August reading of a winter economy: the lift companies have mostly published 2026-27 (Megève's PDF is stamped April; Zermatt's dynamic floor and Verbier's CHF 94 are live), while most terraces still show last winter's card, and the register says so row by row: ten rates are stated 2026-27, sixty-one are venues' last published cards, and twenty-five famous names publish nothing. When the new menus drop in late November, the register re-reads them, ahead of the season and its press.

What the index cannot see it does not invent: no "price on request" was requested, closed-for-rebuild houses (Salastrains, until December 2026) are recorded as exactly that, and every register line carries the URL it was read from, checked on 5 August 2026. The full method and the per-resort research trail, verbatim quotes included, ship with the repository.

Download the Après Index register (CSV). One row per published price or per silent famous name, with the ECB fixings included.

The silence has a winter accent. On the beaches it was demand pricing; in the Alps it is the telephone, and it is practically a tradition. Farinet in Verbier, by its own description the best après bar in the world, publishes hours, bands and a happy hour, and not one price. CERVO's slope-end terraces in Zermatt reserve tables for members of its "Democratic Mountain Community". Cocorico in Val d'Isère books its VIP tables by email, La Folie Douce prints a €20,000 champagne package but not the minimum spend of the table you drink it at, and Gstaad's lift company managed to announce a new fixed-pricing policy without publishing a single figure.

The purest specimen is the Eagle Ski Club, whose whole web presence is a login page, and the most instructive is St Moritz: the one alpine venue that does publish a sitting-down price, Paradiso, publishes only the CHF 40 fee for membership of the terrace, not what anything on the terrace costs. The Mediterranean hides prices to move them with demand. The Alps hide them because, on the mountain, being asked is the product.

Ten entries from the winter ledger, each traceable to a printed card, an official tariff or a login page standing where a tariff should be.

For the planning reader, three practical lines. The anchors are already public: Megève has printed €65, Val d'Isère €78 and Courchevel €84.20 for 2026-27, Verbier CHF 94, and the dynamic systems (St Moritz from CHF 55, Zermatt from CHF 89, Aspen from $127) reward booking the moment the calendars open, which the operators have also published: Zermatt's season starts 1 November, Gstaad's first lifts turn 20 November, Val d'Isère opens 28 November, Aspen on Thanksgiving Day and Megève on 19 December.

The drinks arbitrage is real and walkable: the same afternoon on Corviglia costs half as much two lift stations above the Palace, Courchevel's cheapest famous vin chaud sits on its most famous terrace at Cap Horn, and the family round of hot chocolates runs £4.59 to £11.03 depending on whose crest is on the saucer. And the sterling lens matters twice in Switzerland: the pound buys CHF 1.09, so the Palace's sixteen-franc pour lands at £14.70 before the view is included.

This page joins the house set: the Sunbed Index prices the coast's furniture, the Ibiza Receipt prices the decade, the Ibiza Census counts the parties, and this index pours the winter. Summer measures the season; winter, it turns out, mostly declines to be measured, which is why the measuring matters.