For years Aldi and Lidl flew beneath the radar of the big supermarkets, certainly when it came to wine. Each offered a meagre, core range of around 60 wines, compared to the 900 listed by Tesco, and instead of all those crazy, cut-price deals, the pricing in the German chains never varied from one week to the next. How boring was that?
If instore promotions set your heart racing, you may find Aldi and Lidl’s approach slightly dull, though perhaps more honest than those bottles that flip between £10 and their true value of £5. Conceding that the Germans have been steeling market share, Tesco’s has had a change of heart.
“We’ve done consumer research and have found our customers want more stable pricing, so a lot of the range has moved towards that,” Graham Nash, Tesco’s product development manager for wine, recently told the Drinks Business. Those spurious half-price deals have been dropped and the wine range slashed to 660 in the chain’s biggest superstores.
There’s nothing like that number in my local Tesco, though there are more than Lidl’s standard offering. The flipside for the German chain is its ability to bring in a stash of interesting wines on a seasonal, one-off basis. The first of these ‘Lidl cellar promotions’ last September, added 48 French wines rising to a top price of £25.99 for an unclassified Haut-Medoc.
The latest batch has expanded outwards from France to embrace other areas, notably Tuscany. “It’s a classic region with world class wines,” Lidl’s buyer, Ben Hulme, told me. “We've tried to make the range as eclectic as possible, however wines from other regions in Italy will feature in the future.”
As a fan of Italian wines, it’s hard to get excited by the typical High Street offering of prosecco, pinot grigio and a clutch of hardy perennials like bog standard soave, chianti and valpolicella. If you are lucky to live near a good independent merchant that problem’s solved, otherwise, if you’re happy to buy by the mixed case, try the Wine Society.
The problem for all those good, medium-sized Italian producers is that they can’t really afford to be in supermarkets where suppliers are treated as a revenue stream to be milked for listing fees and kickbacks. But maybe if Lidl’s foray into the more unexplored corners of Italy proves a success, they will have another change of heart?
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