Tag Archives: supermarkets

Shopping for wine in supermarkets

7 Replies

Imagine the scene:

Tesco. Saturday morning. Shopping trolley already half-full. Bored kids. Lots more things to get done today but … you want to get a bottle of wine as a treat for yourself at dinner.

You turn into the wine aisle having resisted the siren call of the latest 2-for-1 deals everywhere else in the store – and all you can see is a wall of 600+ different wines never mind spirits, fortified wines, beers and ciders.

“Hell! OK, 2-for-1 it is. Maybe next time I’ll get something nice.”

Well, at last I have found someone working on a solution! I’ve always thought that something like this ought to have been done before now, but I had not yet found it.

Supermarket Wine is a site dedicated to bringing together EXPERT reviews of wines that can be found in the UK supermarkets so that you can improve your shopping there.

Strangely (for me) this site seems to have been around since 2006, but I must admit I had not heard about it. However, I saw it on a list of must-see wine sites (on a US blog) and thought I’d give it a go.

As I have mentioned before on this site, there are others looking at this area; including Love That Wine and Quaffers Offers (amongst others). The issue was that one had the consumer input, the other the expert view. The ideal, of course, was to combine them. This is what the new site strives to do.

The key has always been finding how to communicate the value of a wine relative to its price. A low priced wine might be great value if the wine is good enough, but how much better is a more expensive bottle? The risk of getting it wrong increases greatly as the cost of the bottle goes up, so consumers are naturally wary.

The solution for supermarketwine.com is to republish the ‘expert’ reviews of the wine columnists of the various British newspapers, already trusted sources of reviews, and link them to the wines with each retailer. Easy!

If you see a review you like, go to this site and link through to any of the retailers who stock it. In addition, once on the site you can read, and contribute, to the ratings from other consumers. You can filter reviews by retailer, price, grape variety, taste characteristic and even reviewer. How many more options would you like?

In practice, the site seems rather short of consumer input (I have yet to find one to be honest) but in true Wine 2.0 fashion the option is there.

Maybe if we give it a go we could build up the kind of traffic that would make this site a worthy reference site for consumers, the developer has certainly put lots of time and effort into building it.

And there is one last thing. I don’t like sites that give me no information on who is behind the business. This site is totally anonymous. No contact details, no name, nothing personal at all. I’m sure the person, or persons, will have the best of reasons for this, but one of the best ways sites can generate customer loyalty is to create a relationship with consumers. Anonymous sites do not do this.

So, Mr/Ms SupermarketWine.com, who are you? Fancy a relationship?

Alcohol Monopoly

4 Replies

I have been visiting Nova Scotia in Canada for a number of years (it is absolutely beautiful by the way) and usually I am critical of the concept of the Canadian state (well, the Provincial governments) having a monopoly on the sale of alcohol. You can check out the range here.

For those of us living in the UK or most of Europe, the idea that the state should control what wines or spirits should be available, where, and for how much is extraordinary (if you live or visit Sweden this is probably not such a shock for you).

[Some might argue of course that this is exactly where we are heading in the UK because of the retail strength of the supermarkets like Tesco – but even here we at least have a number of alternative ranges to choose from]

My reaction is usually – “How could one organisation tell us what wines we can drink?”, especially when the result, at least in Canada, is a pretty limited range of branded wines?

The reason for this structure is most likely still a hang-over (!) from Prohibition (yes, they had it here too), and there is a sort of puritanical streak to the management of this ‘vice’ which I personally disagree with. It also means that there is a form of “lowest common denominator” effect at work which determines that all wine have to be available in minimum quantities to supply all stores, have to be consistent and also be able to comply with the kinds of red-tape only government departments are able to create. This often results in a pretty bland range.

However, there is one small silver lining to this was pointed out to me which I had not considered. In the UK we have such a high density of population that we can pretty well guarantee access to supermarkets or shops wherever we are, with a few exceptions of course. This means that the market can operate quite freely and there will be someone who can sell you what you are looking for within a reasonable distance.

When you take a country like Canada, this is definitely not the case outside of most large cities. So much of the infrastructure here depends on government support to reach tiny communities in distant areas, that if the government did not step in, certain items (especially luxury items such as wine) would either be impossible to get, or prohibitively expensive.

OK, so wine is probably not the main justification for this type of system, and I’m sure they make a pretty penny or two in tax from selling and taxing all that alcohol, but at least they can get it. Hopefully in time, and with a little popular pressure, the range will improve further.

I’m sure the local “liquor commission” would tell you that a monopoly also means that there are clear & limited channels for reaching consumers, giving the opportunity for ‘managing’ consumer alcohol consumption. I still think that in the longer term education works better than restricting access. However, thinking positively, it does mean there are obvious places to start reaching consumers with information on wine to educate and inform them and improve their experience.

Still, I’ll take Tesco’s range over the NSLC one any day!

Love that wine, or do I?

8 Replies


I came across a reference to his site today: www.lovethatwine.co.uk in off licence news (no website! tsk, tsk).

To be entirely honest with you I had seen them before at the BBC Good Food Show (in fact an ex-colleague works there) but had failed to take in the concept before.

I believe the idea is to have a reference site for all wines in UK retail, with reviews by ‘real people’. Thus the site allows any consumer to register to add their tasting notes on any wine and thus to create a shared database of wine notes.

You can read the details of what they offer here, so I won’t do their pitch for them, however the concept is one I have toyed with myself before.

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a site that told you what wines, from the vast number available in any particular UK supermarket, are actually any good.”

The issue is 1) how you get the information and 2) how you get it to pay for itself? The second would probably sort itself out if you go the first right, so I have wondered about it.

Love That Wine has decided to aggregate the views of tens of thousands of consumers. Presumably with a broad enough base the scores would reflect a general consensus. The problems with this approach are:

* quite how many people do you need to post regularly to ensure the number of views on any particular wine are actually representative? LOTS!
* that consumers are likely to post only on wines that generated strong feelings (positive or negative) so results will be skewed
* that consumers may not ‘understand’ a particular wine and put off that small niche of drinkers who might actually like the wine (e.g. old style white Rioja or anything German)
* they make regular references to “unbiased opinions” and “like-minded wine shoppers”, but how true is that really?

This is the usual debate about tasting notes, points, reviews, etc. that all such sites contend with. Apparently they have a registered database of 50,000 consumers so maybe their reach can become broad enough, but it will take a lot more than that I suspect.

The alternative is a site such as Quaffers Offers. The design is awful, but the notes are useful as they are always by the same person/people and thus you can achieve some level of consistency.

Despite the reliance in both cases on “offers”, the fact that these are linked to tasting notes and reviews means that the value of the wine (quality relative to price) is also addressed.

My ideal solution would be to take the Love That Wine model and combine it with the Quaffers one, to get a headline “expert” view on each wine that would be supported, or not, by the members. Something akin to amazon.co.uk‘s book reviews, with both the main review and the customer comments.

Of course it would be difficult for one expert to manage to taste all these wines alone, so you’d have to put together a team of ‘experts’ with some commonality of taste to review the wines. Now, where might such a group of people be found, I wonder?