The price of certain wines zig-zag throughout the year. Rosie Murray-West tracks the changes
By Rosie Murray-West | Telegraph – Thu, Jun 20, 2013 18:32 BST
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| Yahoo! Finance UK - Glasses of red and white wine. Image: Fotolia |
I would like to claim that I have become a sophisticated wine shopper in my old age but in actual fact, like so many of us, I am guilty of buying the nearest bottle that is on offer.
Supermarkets understand this, which is why the prices of various bottles of plonk tend to zigzag up and down like a guest making his way back home from a good dinner. Ninety per cent of the wine sold in Britain, either online or in a shop, is sold on some sort of offer, meaning that we have no idea what the bottles are actually worth.
A brief search on Mysupermarket, a website that shows you how the prices of supermarket items have changed over a year, shows that it is rarely worth buying the big-name wines at their ordinary price. Instead, as many sensible shoppers have learnt, you are better off buying whatever bottle is on offer, or waiting until your favourite is. It is bound to come around soon enough. Take, just for an example, Vina Maipo, apparently a "crisp sauvignon blanc with varietal aromas of gooseberries, minerals and delicate citrus fruits".
It is on offer at half price this week at Sainsbury's. Mysupermarket lists it as a "savvy buy" this week, as it is now just £4.99. But a quick look at its price over the past year shows that it is bobbing between £5 and £10 on an almost monthly basis. It doesn't take a genius to work out that buying it at £9.99 is a mug's game. Five pounds is its "real" price.
This is far from being merely a Sainsbury's phenomenon. Tesco's half-price offers this week include a Hardys Legacy Shiraz cabernet sauvignon. Again, its highest price is £9.99, and it is reduced to £4.99. Over the past four months it has been reduced below £9.99 six times several times to just £4.
The wine remained below a fiver for the entire period between Christmas and February. If I paid £10 for it and then found that out later, I'd feel like I'd been conned.
Shoppers aren't stupid. The net result of all this game of cat and mouse between the supermarkets and their customers is that no one trusts supermarket wine pricing. However, unlike, say, Heinz baked beans or Andrex toilet roll, wine pricing confuses many of us to the point at which we just grab the nearest bottle and trot off.
Not all wine experts like to talk openly about this. One, who did not wish to be named, described it as "a very complex problem". "The supermarkets don't expect to sell the wine at full price," he said, adding that it leaves the consumers confused.
Gavin Quinney, a winegrower in Bordeaux who makes house wines for Rick Stein and Gordon Ramsay, described the supermarket pricing tactics as "pseudo offers". He pointed out that the UK duty on a bottle of wine is a fixed £2, no matter what the wine is worth, and there is 20pc VAT. "We encourage consumers to trade up, because of the fixed £2, but if they don't know what the wine is worth it is a problem," he said. "The art of hoodwinking customers is the norm."
When the products are put on offer it is the supplier who normally takes the hit, not the supermarket. Mr Quinney said his only experience of this not happening was with Waitrose, which sometimes does a 25pc off all wines sale.
So how should we negotiate the wine-buying minefield, and, if we really want to buy a bottle of wine worth £10, how do we go about it? Clubs such as the Wine Society, which is mutually owned, might allow you to get a better deal, experts suggest. You must become a member to buy Wine Society wines, and you would need to do so in bulk.
The society offers several bottles for under a fiver, and many more at £5.50. If you are prepared to spend more, the society's Corbières, at £7.25 a bottle, won a gold medal in recent wine awards, as did its £6.95 Dolcetto.
Alternatively, experts suggest that you stick to the supermarket's own-brand wines, which are not subject to quite the same zigzag pricing. Last September's International Wine Challenge awards saw Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Chenin Blanc 2011 and Marks & Spencer's Le Froglet rosé 2011 win awards. Two Tesco Finest branded wines also did well a Pouilly-Fumé and a Gigondas.
Unlike the up-and-down pricing of the wines mentioned above, the £12.99 Gigondas has been reduced only twice in the past year, and even then by only a few pence. Customers wanting to know that they are getting value for money should take note. Sometimes a good discount doesn't mean a great deal.
This week's offers...
• Co-operative Food is offering Robinson's fruit and barley squash at £1, down from £2.05
• The Co-op is also offering Pimm's No 1 at £11 a bottle, down from £13
• The Co-operative's margherita pizza, 465g, is now £2 , down from £4
• Marks & Spencer is offering its British strawberries at half price £2 for 400g while you can also buy 300g of strawberries and 300g of cherries for £4 combined. The store is also offering extra thick single cream at half price, 56p for 300ml
• Lidl's half-price weekend offers include Braemoor piri piri chicken at £1.34 for 540g, 500g of cherry vine tomatoes for 74p and 100g of dark chocolate for 17p
• Lidl has fresh watermelon on offer at £2 each, down from £3.49, until Thursday
• Lidl has Robinson's no added sugar squash in either orange or apple and blackcurrant at 79p a litre, down from £1.39
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