Supermarkets and wine: Tesco’s French wine made in Germany

I recently came across an article on a local Scottish paper about a French wine bought from Tesco, reduced from £14.99 to £5 made in Germany. A customer, not a wine expert, after buying the wine discovered that the wine had been made in Germany and had nothing to do with the wine that should have been in the bottle; according to him the wine was worth no more than £2.99, less than the price he had paid. Tesco admitted that they had received a handful of complaints and that they were investigating the issue as a matter of urgency. This news did not surprise me, what did astonish me however, was that none of the other wine blogs or newspapers had wrote about it, keeping it locally, whilst I think this is only the top of the iceberg and that there are many more cases undiscovered.

This is all due to the pressure put by supermarkets to wine makers to produce wines at a certain price, reduced year on year, with little margin to keep the quality untouched. The screw cap is one of them. Screw caps are used because are a lot cheaper than cork, 2p against 30p for a good quality cork. A lot has been said about advantages or disadvantages of screw cap versus cork, however, the driving factor behind them is to keep cost down. But while screw caps and lighter bottles can help in reducing the price, the main cost is still given by what inside the bottle, the wine and wine makers cannot afford to make wine at a loss, they wont last long, therefore if they cannot produce the wine they have been asked legally, are forced to follow illegal alternatives.

In the case of the French wine above what happened was that the bottle had wine made in a different country because the wine from Germany was cheaper than the same wine from France. Even if the same grape can be, and it is, planted in many countries or regions across the globe, the result is never the same, in the best case scenario, the wine produced has different characteristics, but there are also plenty of cases where the grape is not suitable and the resulting wine is a wine of lower quality. Examples of regions where certain grapes have found the perfect environment are Bordeaux, Champagne, Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino only to mention a few. What can we learn from this episode then? The most important lesson is to be very careful when buying wines on offer, always remember the say “All that glitters is not gold”.