The good and bad news for UK wine buffs

There is bad news for wine drinkers in the UK. As chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced quietly in his budget last month, from August 1 duty will increase by 44p on an average bottle of table wine, by 97p on a bottle of sherry and by £1.30 on a bottle of port. It is the biggest rise in wine duty since 1975.

Judging from what has happened in the wake of past increases, I have a nasty feeling that some retailers will be unwilling to increase the price of their own bottlings by this much, so may well look at sourcing cheaper and generally poorer quality wine for them.

Smaller or more traditional wine merchants may just have to take a deep breath and explain to their customers why their prices have gone up — or hope that between now and then currency movements will soften the blow.

One significant wine retailer in Britain has decided to promise its customers that current prices (and quality) will be maintained until the end of the year. “It will cripple our margin,” says Steve Finlan, CEO of The Wine Society, “but I think we can do it. It’s a very Wine Society thing to do. No one else could.”

What he means is that this 148-year-old wine-buying co-operative’s shareholders are its wine-buying members, each of whose shares cost just £40 with half of that redeemable against their first order. So the Society doesn’t have to pay dividends or even make a profit. Member-shareholders have the satisfaction of knowing that the Society’s prices and quality are some of the best in the land, if not the very best in terms of pricing, especially as delivery is free.

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Finlan feels he can make the bold promise to hold prices because the Society’s biggest investment to date, a fifth temperature-controlled warehouse for its members’ reserves next to the Society’s Stevenage headquarters, has already been accounted for. (The move from central London to the unglamorous outskirts took place back in 1965 when the Society’s chair, the late Edmund Penning-Rowsell, was also this paper’s wine correspondent, scrupulously avoiding mention of the Society.)

The Society has a crack team of professional wine buyers, who are encouraged to buy direct rather than from UK importers, and are increasingly sourcing special bottlings to be labelled either The Society’s X or, if they are of an even higher quality, The Society’s Exhibition X, a reference to the 1874 International Exhibition in the Royal Albert Hall that led to the Society’s formation.

The exceptionally small 2021 wine harvest in France, with shortages most pronounced in white burgundy, caused a particular headache for the Society’s burgundy buyer Toby Morrhall, who was unable to put together an en primeur offer of 2021 white burgundy. (To judge from the forum on JancisRobinson.com, these en primeur offers are eagerly awaited. It is also the only UK merchant routinely to offer mixed cases en primeur.)

So, in order to maintain quality and volume for The Society’s White Burgundy 2021 (£12.95), it had made for it Le Stopgap Chardonnay 2021 Vin de France, a blend of wine from the Mâconnais in southern Burgundy and the Languedoc way to the south that is currently reduced to £7.50 from £8.50. The 2022 vintage of The Society’s White Burgundy is being offered for £1 less than the 2021, just £11.95, in recognition of the more generous crop last year.

Finlan is bullish about current sales and reports a record Christmas last year. But, he says, “Every pound has had to be fought for. Our members shop in supermarkets and the level of discounting [there] has been extraordinary. Supermarket wine price inflation has been so low that it feels as though they must be using wine as a loss leader.”

He adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if, when the duty increases come in, some supermarkets resort to “high-low” pricing, the tactic whereby they deliberately increase the price of a wine before later “reducing” it to what they really plan to sell it for so they can present it as a special offer.

The average price of a bottle of wine bought from The Wine Society is £11.50, almost twice the national average. But £40mn of its annual sales come from wines under £10. “We don’t have huge ambitions in that segment except to maintain market share and quality,” according to Finlan.

Of half a million members, about 175,000 are active. The stereotypical member is a claret-loving professional who’s at least middle aged but Finlan claims that, during lockdown, the average age of joiners was 10 years younger than before. “At our Burgundy and Rhône walk-round tastings the crowd is 1680937431 younger than ever.”

Finlan admits that, when members reach 75, they start drinking less and working their way through their reserves. And the Society’s sales figures provide a useful record of other wine-drinking patterns too. He reports that last Christmas saw a return to classic regions, with New Zealand, Australia and Chile less popular than in the past. Members are currently especially keen on Argentina, South Africa, Portugal and, especially, Greece — as well as on sparkling wines and champagne. When I ask why, I receive a one-word answer: “Fashion.”

During lockdown, the average age of Wine Society joiners was 10 years younger than before

At the Society’s spring tasting for wine writers, I was pleased to meet three members who had been picked at random from those who post on its forum and invited to taste with us professionals. The Society is pretty good at customer engagement and is one of the British wine companies taking the most aggressive steps towards analysing every aspect of sustainability.

Light-weighting of bottles is just one of many steps it is taking towards reducing its carbon footprint. The wine list at a recent tasting aimed to include bottle weights for the first time, though I was warned that this time around they were not 100 per cent accurate.

After a strict selection by the combined palates of their buyers at a competitive taste-off, there were 69 wines on that list, but since the Society’s own bottlings are available only in the UK, I restricted myself to the 56 that are likely to be available in countries other than Britain. There were very few duds and the ones I would head for are listed in the box.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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