When is a half price wine not a half price wine?
At Classic Wine Direct we’re pretty upfront about what we do – we can’t compete with supermarkets on price so we offer wines from off the beaten track instead. We believe that these wines are more interesting and quite simply, tastier. people who drink wine don’t really know the true value of wine.
Back in 2006, Jean-Manuel Spriet, the then chief executive of Pernod Ricard UK, sent shockwaves through the wine trade by admitting that many of the “half price” wine deals in supermarkets were actually a rip-off.
The fact that a leading player in the wine business had admitted that consumers were being conned caused many a raised eyebrow.
half price deals are not in fact deals at all according to Spiret. simply, a bottle reduced from £7.99 to £3.wines are more likely to be worth £3.99.99 in the first place.
they mark up wines at selected regional outlets for a short period to cover them legally then mark it down. wine customers will believe they are getting a bargain price. Confused? the general idea is.
The industry beleives that the “mass market” wine drinker is obsessed by the £3.99 price point and this affects the way that retailers are selling us wine and the way that some suppliers are now producing their wines.
In Spiret’s mind ’Consumers know they are getting misled … they get used to it. At the end of the day, it just leads to the impoverishment of the wine trade”.
Spiret’s insight provides us with a depressingly cynical view of the way wine is both sold by the big retailers and supplied by the big wine brands. More worryingly it gives us an insight into what the big retailers really view their customers to be, namely lazy and ignorant.
the wine industry is not the only industry where these marketing practices happen.
two thirds of the wine sales are taken up by the supermarkets.
If the regular wine drinker believes that he is getting £7.99 of value from a £3.99 bottle then it follows that it will be much harder for the independent wine retailer to sell something whose real value is (and always was) £7.99.
There is, of course, no end in sight to this type of price fraud – the subjectivity of a wine’s value leaves this particular sector open to all sorts of underhand practices.
However, if the political mood continues to be against discount selling for alcohol, it will be interesting to see how the big retailers find a real price for wines they have knowingly mis-sold for the last 10 years.
