Supermarket Wine Wars 2013 – The Return of the Festive Bargains

Jon Rebuck

First it was Tesco, then Waitrose, Morrisons have cottoned on, and Asda are about to join the party.

What’s the big secret? There’s money to me made in the growing UK online wine market and no one is better suited to make it than our biggest UK supermarkets, which have the brand, the customers and distribution to deliver mass volumes.

Five of the large supermarkets now have a dedicated wine websites to tempt in wine consumers and the ones that do not will surely follow in the near future. With this comes a much larger range of wines appealing to a broader audience of wine drinkers. Waitrose and Morrisons allow you to choose you own wines and M&S and Tesco sell wines by the case (6 bottle case). Minimum order is 6 bottles apart from Waitrose where it is 12.)

But the exciting bit for shoppers is when they go on offer, such as 25% off all wines and today (1st November), Waitrose, Morrisons are M&S are, and Tesco are on 15% off (with lots of wines on offer as well), the time to stock up for Christmas is ripe. How can they make such great offers? The online wine market in the UK is huge (over £1 Billion), and being supermarkets there must be a great determination to obtain as bigger market share as possible, you would imagine there is a huge desire for customer acquisition which may initially be a more important driver than profitability.

We try our best to help you at Wines Direct by giving you tools to make an informed decision on what to purchase. We ask wine experts to help you understand more about wines, how they taste, what food they are best enjoyed with, and an understanding of the quality of the wine. We also have money savings tools such as our deal finder, vouchers codes, historical pricing, wines offers and champagne offers pages. Our aim is to show you the best deals available online not only based on price and discount but also on quality and taste, as there are so many wines available at a discount is if often more important to know how to find new wines you are going to enjoy rather than what is the greatest bargain of them all!

Please drink sensibly this festive season. Drink Aware