Wine market in United Kingdom

For many centuries, England, and then Britain, has been the most influential market in the world. The demand formed in it shaped many wine regions and styles of wine, including Bordeaux, Champagne, Burgundy, and Port. Although no longer the biggest, it is still a very important market for these regions.

London is still widely perceived by many as the center of the worldwide wine trade, the key setter of consumption trends, and the capital of fine wine consumption. The UK import market for Burgundy wines in 2024 amounted to 254.1 million euros in export prices with the volume of 13.2 million bottles (EUR 19.25 per bottle),^[7] losing only to the US, with 369.6 million euros and 20.9 million bottles (EUR 17.68 per bottle).^[8]

As wine slowly started to become more fashionable among all layers of British society in the 1960s, it was the beer brewers who used their accumulated capital and vertical integration with retail to conquer the emerging mass-produced wine market^[9].

In 1975, one of the most successful mass-market wine brands was launched in Britain, Le Piat d’Or, made from French wine bought in bulk and sweetened before bottling, marketed to a female audience. This product was engineered after conducting a focus group in which the participants dismissed a second-growth Bordeaux as ‘harsh’ and ‘barely drinkable’ and favoured sweetened bulk wine.^[10] It defined the style that is still popular among certain cohorts in the UK.

The unique feature of the UK is importing in bulk and domestic bottling. 43% of wine is imported in bulk and then bottled within the country.^[11] In mass-produced Australian wines bottled in Britain, sweetening is common, and the use of high color concentrates allegedly too.^[12]

The market for domestically bottled wines is dominated by vertically integrated transnational conglomerates, such as Vinarchy (previously known as Accolade Wines; producing around 384 million bottles of wine per year worldwide, mostly in Australia),^[13] and Treasury Wine Estates. They sell their wines primarily in supermarkets.

The largest wine distributors in the on-trade sector are Matthew Clark (pubs, family restaurants) and Bibendum (fine dining, upper tier), owned by the same parent company C&C Group, and LWC Group. Other major wine specialist distributors are Enotria, Liberty Wines and Berkmann Wine Cellars.

The off-trade market is highly vertically integrated, with many supermarkets heavily relying on their own imports and, to a certain extent, their private labels. Some retailers import in bulk and bottle in the UK. Tesco is the largest retailer; it sells around 25% of wine bottles in total in the UK; Sainsbury’s sells around 17%.^[14]

The UK is often considered to be a very price-sensitive market, along with Germany. In practice, that means a higher share of supermarkets, lower margins in the off-trade sector, customers’ sensitivity to discounts.^[15] As Matthew Gaughan points out in his podcast “The culture of wine”, this can be partially explained by a certain reverse class consciousness, where it would seem inappropriate for a working-class person to spend more than a minimum on a bottle of wine, although they readily buy expensive football tickets.^[16]

Compiled and checked by Ilya Zabolotnov