Jascots focuses expansion on Italy and Spain ranges

By Erin Smith

Published: 22 September, 2016

Jascots Wine Merchants rolled out 47 news wines at its autumn trade held on Tuesday 20 September 2016, with a focused expansion on Italian and Spanish wines.

"The focus of the range review was Italy and Spain. We crunched the numbers and looked both at our current clients,and key accounts that we wanted to win, then looked at the distribution of varieties by country and price points. That really illustrated that we had some opportunities in our range. So we focused on those areas," explain Adam Porter, the head of buying and marketing at Jascots.

For Porter, "the diversity of varieties within Italy is probably the biggest opportunity" he was hoping to capitalise on. The addition of some Spanish growers was in response to growing demand for "high-altitude Grenache, which we see increasing at the moment," said Porter.

The additions are also helping to fill gaps in Jascots style ranges as well. "There is a heavy focus on more savoury style of wines for both the red and whites we added. It is moving away from utterly fruit forward styles," explains Porter.

He pointed out that following doing research looking at wine list of current and future clients they identified not just regions and varieties where they potential may had a gap, but also price points as well where they could compete.

He said: "We also made sure that we launched at breadth of price points. So you will see a lot of our new lines are really focusing on quite hard price points. But we also added some more esoteric wines, like the new English wines we added at a more premium price point."

Recently Jascots announced it would be implementing a price freeze through the end of the year.

Porter said: "We think the market is extremely competitive and we are an on-trade specialist we get that it is a real challenge to have price increases hit you right before Christmas. We want to be selling more wine right now to more people."

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