Earlier this week I stumbled on a past column written by a former colleague, Tan Parsons.

Tan wrote, almost two years ago to the day, about how there was a “£200m opportunity” in the £6-£8 price bracket for wine.

“That opportunity will remain untapped unless we can find a way to get the information over in a way that is practical, effective and easy to implement,” he wrote in July 2014.

Almost immediately after, I read the wine feature in this issue of Retail Express. This feature reports that in the year to June 2015, sales in the aforementioned £6-8 price-bracket rose by 3.4% – and those in the £7-8 range grew by nearly 4%.

So sales are rising in the area that had previously been identified as a key target, and all is well with the world, right?

Not so fast. Toni Ingram at Pernod Ricard adds that “many” retailers are missing out on the opportunity created by premium wine. In the feature she urges people to “over-represent” the category on shelf.

It’s interesting what different people are told. This week I got another survey in my inbox, this time from a ‘personalised wine retailer’. They highlighted the survey by saying that they’d found that “a fiver is the limit” for 35% of the population.

It’s interesting, because in the same release, they reveal that only 50% of those 10,000 people surveyed say that cost is any form of influence on their decision. Meaning that half the population don’t care about
cost at all.

That 35% figure comes from the question “How much DO you spend on a bottle of wine?” – note, it isn’t how much WOULD you spend. There is a big, big difference in those two questions.

There are a myriad of influencers on wine purchasing – including origin and age, through to packaging and occasion. It can be impossible to meander a way
through them all.

But two years ago we said there was an opportunity, sales are on an upward curve, and suppliers have said there is still a mega opportunity there.

Grasp it.