Forget about a fiver – a good bottle of wine starts at £6
We may be a thirsty nation, but we are not always a spendy one. While Britons are famous for keeping incomes healthy among the bar-owning inhabitants of various European sunspots, our fondness for quality has never matched our passion for quantity. And things appear to be getting worse: according to the consumer research group Kantar, the proportion of UK households buying wine has dropped from 71% to 68% since the beginning of 2017, while one in three people balk at paying more than £5 for a bottle of wine.
Wine is a luxury, so it is not surprising that expenditure on it goes down in austere times. And there are, clearly, many bottles to be had within this budget: Waitrose’s “crisp and floral Italian white” is £4.99; Kooliburra Australian shiraz, from Aldi, is £3.99. So what is the problem?
Well, thanks to duty rises, a bottle at £5 is not necessarily half as good as a £10 bottle. In fact, it is probably much less than half as good. And it is certainly less good than it used to be. That is not prejudice; it is maths. Wine duty in the UK is £2.23 – that is a flat rate on a 75cl bottle of still, unfortified wine, whether you pay £4 for that bottle or £400, and it has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Then there is VAT on the duty and the wine itself, so if you pay a fiver for your bottle you are at £3.06 – and you haven’t yet paid for packaging or shipping, much less any wine. Put simply, it is not wine snobbery to suggest that wine priced below £5 cannot be good. It is magical thinking to believe that it can be.
The UK has among the highest wine taxes in Europe – and they will only get worse if or when we leave Europe and start paying full tax on European wine. Those cheap wines? They are probably supermarket loss-leaders, a calculated cost to get wine drinkers through the doors.
If wine drinkers subtracted the duties and realised they were paying less than £2 for their wine, they might be tempted to spend a little more – and, if necessary, to justify it by drinking a little less.
Otherwise, bag-in-box wines are getting better, are more sustainable, have cheaper packaging costs and tend to last longer, as there is no pressure to finish that last glass-worth that won’t taste good by tomorrow. (If you are finishing a box in one sitting, it is probably time to stop drinking altogether: they are usually 225cl, equivalent to three bottles). But, while these tend to be cheaper, the better ones still don’t work out at under £5 a bottle. Even the Wine Society – the wine cooperative that offers exceptional value, due to its longstanding relationships with winemakers, vast storage facilities and profit-sharing structure – no longer sells wines for less than £5. That said, it has a great many for under £6, which should really be the threshold these days.
This article was amended on 14 October 2019 to clarify that Britain levies among the highest rates of taxation on wine in Europe, not the highest rate.