Friday read: Sellex’s Anthony Carr on supermarkets’ underselling of English wine

By Anthony Carr

Published: 02 August, 2024

With English wine enjoying an explosion of growth – and almost a third of Britons saying in a recent Aldi survey that they would celebrate a wedding with English fizz – supermarkets are not doing enough to either exploit that growth or promote it further.

The Grocer reported earlier this year that nearly two-thirds (66%) of shoppers in England said stocking a great range of brands with provenance from England, Wales and Scotland was an important consideration in selecting their supermarket of choice. But you could be forgiven for not realising it when visiting the average UK supermarket. In too many instances, British brands are being marginalized on fixture. If more established brands can hold their own on fixture, surely growth brands such as those in English wine should be more visible and executed with greater impact.

English and Welsh wine is unquestionably growing in popularity. Britain is the fastest-growing wine region in the world, according to the property group Knight Frank. Between 2017 and 2022, England and Wales more than doubled wine production from 5.3m to 12.2m bottles, according to WineGB, which expects wine production to double again to 24.7m bottles by 2032.

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Moreover, these facts are not lost on the traditional Champagne houses. Two of the best-known, Taittinger and Pommery, have both bought land and planted vines in England in the last decade. The world’s biggest sparkling wine producer, Germany’s Henkell Freixenet, acquired English Wine Estate Bolney in 2022.

Based on evidence of store visits that Sellex conducted over June and July, with some fantastic temporary displays and permanently enhanced fixtures on beers and spirts, regardless of stores visited, the wine displays were a pale imitation.

Chapel Down is just one of many fantastic English success stories, being stifled in store by poor fixture location and standout, not to mention the extreme security measures being deployed by retailers, even in lower retail crime areas.

There is much work to do to re-invigorate wine fixtures in UK supermarkets – so why can’t English Wines take the lead?

The challenge to the English Wine industry is to work out how it can take category leadership within the sparkling wine category and bring some intrigue and excitement back to the wine aisle. This means developing compelling category insights to make a ‘category beacon’ of English wine, both sparkling and non-sparkling, in aisle; to look to other fantastic English success stories to create occasion-based merchandising solutions in and out of aisle; to underwrite potential losses in a limited store trial and encourage retailers to ease security measures and see what happens to sales.

English wine can also harness the readily available (and infinitely usable) EPOS data for UK grocers to target particular stores for special attention to disproportionately grow sales. And finally, we would urge them to engage with their retail customers to understand the retail media options which are available, set clear ROI expectations as they do so, but seek to understand what can be done to raise awareness and increase sales.

Anthony Carr is MD at FMCG and retail consultancy Sellex. Founded over 20 years ago as a specialist sales consultancy, the company has evolved to help organisations instil commercial confidence – through capability development and through consulting.

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