When is supermarket wine worth its full price?

Supermarkets offer a great way to introduce people to wine, making it easy to buy just a single bottle from a vast selection in order to discover what you might like or not like with minimal fuss or complication.

However, they are not good ways to educate shoppers about wine – shoppers take all the risk by buying these wines “blind” so it is only fair that producers and retailers incentivise shoppers to take a risk on a bottle with occasional discounts and offers.

Unfortunately, instead of teaching us about wine, we have become hooked on the offers, so these have to get bigger and bolder all the time to attract attention, and since there is little margin in wine, it means that prices become inflated on SOME wines to pay for the promotions.

The best suggestion is to buy the discounted wines you might like, decide what you would be prepared to pay for it, and only buy it when it is below that price. You may discover you are more than willing to pay full price for it if you love it.

However, the best deals might be those wines from regions and producers too small to afford the promotional activity. Buy stuff you’ve never heard of, instead of flashy bottles, and you might discover the next best thing at a very reasonable price.

Not all supermarkets shy away from allowing customers to try their wines.

At Tasting Sessions we have been working with Sainsbury’s to convert some of their cafés into wine schools for an evening. Customers have been able to try 18 different wines over three different evenings and make their own minds up about what they like and what they don’t.

We’ve had to charge at most events, but this has been a modest £10. Customer receieve a £10 off wine voucher on the night (£30 spend required), so they get their money back if they decide to make a purchase. It’s mainly a way of controlling numbers.

It has been great fun. Different customers have wildly different tastes, though there has often been a standout favourite in each store.

We spend most of our time running public and corporate tasting events and I’d like to say well done to Sainsbury’s for taking the plunge and getting their customers trying their wines. Their buyers have shown their passion for what they do – whether they’re on offer or not.

There might be a few spaces left on our latest events.

I’ve noticed that Sainsbury’s regularly run a special offer at an apparent huge discount (eg 50% off) on one or two wines. Typically these are makes you’ve never heard of (not necessarily a bad thing) but with strangely cheap and nondescript looking labels. These are always duds in my experience, certainly worth no more than the offer price.

It seems this is an instance where you can judge the wine by the label (and the discount)

Waitrose do a bottle of red [and a white] at 4.35 called Cuvee Chausser which is often as good, if not better than some of their 7.00 bottles, and is far better than the ‘sample’ bottles listed above

A few years ago I was buying wine in a supermarket and felt frustrated by the lack of any help and the in-your-face promotions which seemed too good to be true. I didn’t trust the half price offers and yet I knew there were some good wines on the shelf. I read the reviews in The Guardian every weekend, but I just couldn’t remember which ones had been recommended. Then I had a spark of inspiration: I made web sites and I read wine reviews. Why not combine the two? So I came up with Supermarket Wine (http://www.supermarketwine.com). The site aggregates reviews from the national press so anyone can find a recommended wine at their local supermarket. The simple idea was that before you go to the supermarket, you find a wine (or two) which has had the thumbs up from a critic in the national press. And if you like, you go back to the site and write your own review.

Sainsburys has some genuine shockers in its Champagne range – real obscure non-vintage clunkers nominally sold for up to £29.99 then sold at “half price” in their promotions . Even at £12 or £15 they represent poor value . Also a lot of indifferent Cote de Rhone “reduced” to six or seven quid when I’ve seen the same stuff a week before in Calais for 3 Euros – the difference isnt all duty!
Protection for the consumer seems to have nose-dived in recent years in so may respects and far too many household names appear to have acquired the business model of Arthur Daley