We generally have the cheapest prices in the UK for virtually all the wines we sell. So how do we achieve this?

We import the vast majority of the wines we sell ourselves, directly from the wineries. This means there is no importer margin to pay, which is generally a further 30% on top of the landed price in the UK. We use our own warehouse instead of renting space in a bond, although we do have an account with London City Bond which we do use very occasionally when it suits our needs. We then operate on a standard retailer’s margin.

Many of the bigger quality wineries such as Zenato, La Scolca, Ernie Els etc already have established UK importers. We, like all retailers, then have to source these wines through these importers. Fortunately we tend to have good relationships with them, and we work on low margins to pass these natural wines onto our customers at the best prices.

Our retail strategy is all about repeat business. There are plenty of retailers out there charging eye wateringly high prices for the same wines that we sell competitively. They are about high margins with low volume, while we are low margins with higher volume. They rely on getting noticed by sponsoring comparison sites like wine-searcher.com where they only display listings from sponsors, or paying for Ads on Google shopping hoping that people won’t do their own research and look through Google’s generic listings for a better price.

We on the other hand believe in offering our customers the best prices. And we don’t mark up single bottle prices to then offer artificial discounts for full cases. We simply have a fair transparent pricing policy. We then get repeat business from our customers which is good for them, good for us and good for our small wineries too.