Given the shortage of wine routes in Essex, supermarkets remain the main retail outlets for wine in the UK. In the Cape, tasting rooms are big although supermarkets still dominate the scene. So how to compare supermarkets as every blog, website and deadtree column worth its salts loves to publish a Top Ten? UK wine app Wotwine decided to “look beyond eye catching promotions to decide which supermarkets really offered the best value wine” and so assembled “a tasting panel who assigned a monetary value to each vintage they tasted and comparing it to the actual price tag” according to the Telegraph.

This is something we’ve been doing for most of this year at our RECM Best Value series of tastings. The Wotwine results were perhaps not what you’d expect with “nearly two-thirds (65%) of the wines available for sale at Lidl represent good value. Aldi came second with 64% of the wines on its shelves considered a ‘true bargain’ and Asda came third with 48%. In contrast, shoppers at M&S are in danger of over-paying on 74% of the bottles on offer. At Morrisons, 60% of wines are poor value, according to Wotwine; the figure was 59% at the Co-op.”

We had many discussions with Christopher Burr from Wotwine back in January when we set up our RECM Best Value tastings, so it’s nice to see a good idea from Africa infect the UK. Another good idea is marketing wine according to occasion as Aldi do. Robert Joseph highlighted this approach of “telling shoppers that certain bottles were ‘the perfect gift’ or ‘great for a dinner party’ which taps into the way that people think and buy wine.” We rolled this out at 100 Women 100 Wines sponsored by Tops at Spar at the V&A Hotel on the Waterfront three years ago.

So which SA supermarket is the local Lidl and has Woolies been dealt the M&S hand?