UK consumers continue to trade up, with wines priced between £8-9 seeing greatest growth
UK wine drinkers are trading up to more premium priced wines, as sales inched up by 0.9% in the year to 15th June to reach £ 5.064 billion, according to Neilsen data.
The price category that enjoyed the greatest growth in the past year is amongst those wines priced between £8 and £9, which account for 5% of the total UK market, and increased by 12.7%.
Over the same period, wines priced between £9 and £10 which account for 3% of the total market grew by 9;6%. Meanwhile those wines priced at £10 and above also grew, up by 1.7% and adding £319m more to sales.
Wines in the £7 - £8 price sector which accounts for around 11% of total supermarket wine sales (up by one percentage point on last year), also recorded healthy growth, up 10.8% to £566m, adding an additional £54m to the category. This was ahead of the larger £6-7 bracket, which rose 7.7% in the same period, although adding around £70m to the category.
“Price-wise, the entry level £5-6 is [in growth] but it is the £7-8 that is working well in order to trade up,” Neilsen’s commercial business partner for BWS Gemma Cooper told Drinks Business. Together, those two price points accounts for around a third of the market by value.
“You only need to look at some of the most popular brands out there and you’re seeing them bring in products that go all the way up the price ladder to move [consumers] onto the next bracket, then the next price bracket,” Cooper added.
However, the average price for a bottle of wine in the UK is a lowly £5.68, and the lion’s share of wine sales remains the entry-level £5-6, which accounts for nearly a third - 31% - of value sales market share.
Sales in the entry level bracket rose 11.1% in the year to 15 June 2019, an increase of around £160 million, though this seems to have been largely due to price inflation and the steep decline in sub-£5 wines, which fell £284m in the year to June 2019 compared to the previous year – the equivalent of losing nearly 6% of the total of wine sales in the off-trade.