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 The Artt of …Choosing Wisely

So how do I get the best wine for my money?

So what is the best wine? ……. There’s a loaded question  …….  Oz Clarke, Robert Parker, James Halliday etc. all make a living out of rating wine, and they are undoubted experts.

All these guys try to bring a system to their marking, and this is useful if you are buying wines commercially, or if you like to try new wines.

Here’s the big issue  -  how do you compare wines at different prices??

Some systems ignore price and just mark it on a scale, so you are looking at how high up the scale it goes allowing for the price. Many competitions assess the wines within price categories, so gold medal winning wines could be vastly different in price and quality, but very similar in value for money.

Like all things in life, we want to make sure we are getting good value for our money.

But  ……     and its an important but,

Wine (and in fact all alcohol, cigarettes and petrol) has an added complication to it. The duty that is put on wine in the UK is very much higher than the rest of Europe.

The duty on a bottle of wine is now (11/4/2011) £1-81 per bottle, regardless of the selling price.

So a £3.33 bottle (3 for £10) has

56p VAT , 55p retailer profit, 181p DUTY : Total 292p  Remaining 41p

So a £4 bottle has

67p VAT , 83p retailer profit, 181p DUTY : Total 331p  Remaining 69p

So a £5 bottle has

83p VAT , 104p retailer profit, 181p DUTY : Total 368p  Remaining 132p

So a £10 bottle has

167p vat, 208p retailer profit, 181p duty : Total 556p Remaining 444p

Its even worse than this for the cheaper wine, as the wine has to be picked, vinified, safely packaged in bottles, with labels, and then boxed, bulk transported to the country of the seller, go through at least one wholesaler, and eventually delivered to each retail outlet in relatively small quantities. The more expensive wine will be in a better bottle, with superior labels and boxes, but apart from that all the other costs are the same no matter what price the bottle is.

I’m guessing, the cheap 3 for 10 wine is made by someone who gets about 10-20p for what goes into the bottle ……..

Whereas the £10 wine is made by someone who gets about 300p for his wine.

How many times better is the £10 wine ?? Well if I was a wine grower I’d be breaking my back to go from 20p to 300p per bottle.

There are some other points of interest that come up when you look at this

1. When you buy a bottle of wine in Spain say, their duty is 10p, British duty is 171p more than that. If you allow the retailer to make 25% (that’s actually a very small gross profit margin for retail), then add VAT it comes to 270p, add a bit on for shipping and wholesellers costs, and you arrive at £3 per bottle.

If you are buying wine in Spain that you can buy back at home, it should be at least £3 per bottle cheaper in Spain. So its not your lowly wine retailer back at home that’s robbing you, its our favourite robber, the Tax Man

2. When you see that big offer “buy one get one free” or “Half Price” you’ve got to wonder why a winemaker will accept selling a £10 bottle for £5. On the face of it, it could be he wants to promote it, make sure it all sells before the next harvest or many other commercial reasons, which a reduction of 50% would seem possible.

But due to the nature of alcohol duty as shown above, and the other costs involved, apparently this wine maker is selling his wine at say 300p per bottle, and has just decided to sell it at 50-80p, and he does this regularly. Not likely !!! The half price wine is a myth …… you may be getting good value at the offer price ….. but the normal price would be a very disappointing buy at say £10

We promise to always offer our clients value for money whether from a specially reduced wine on offer, or a more expensive but special bottle for whatever the occasion.

Hope we see you again soon.

TAO…