Wine Sampling Session: Internet Face Off

If you buy the weekend newspapers you’re bound to see promotions from time to time for cases of wine from mail order or internet wine companies. The discounts are eye-catching: 50%, 60%, 70% off… But the wines they sell are often exclusive to them so you can’t compare prices – and you can’t try before you buy. So how do you know if you should get involved?

I organised a tasting last week for 20 of us – no experts, just normal drinkers – to sample a few wines to see what we thought. I asked four mail order companies – Laithwaite’s Wine, Virgin Wines, Naked Wines and Stone, Vine & Sun – each to send in a selection of wines that would give an idea of what they offered. Almost like a trailer, so we could sample some of the highlights to get an idea of whether we wanted to see the bigger picture.

Mail order wine in the UK is big business, and it’s a tangled family tree. Laithwaite’s Wine is one of a number of different mail order wine businesses that are owned by parent company Direct Wines. Direct Wines is a family-owned company that was founded in 1969 by Tony Laithwaite, and now owns Laithwaite’s Wine, The Sunday Times Wine Club, The Telegraph Wine Service, Avery’s and a number of other international wine clubs. It has an annual turnover in excess of £340m.

It also happens to own Virgin Wines, but this is run as an independent company, so I thought it would be interesting to include them as well, particularly as they are such a recognisable name. When it was bought in 2008 by Direct Wines, the MD, Rowan Gormley, left Virgin Wines – and set up a new company – Naked Wines.

Stone, Vine and Sun is the plucky underdog. Much smaller than the other three companies, it was established in 2002 by Simon Taylor, who was previously a specialist in Victorian paintings for Sotheby’s for 23 years. It doesn’t advertise like the three bigger companies, so it has to rely on word of mouth.

Every company sent in four wines, each one within a different price band: £5.00 – £7.99; £8.00 – £10.99; £11.00 – £14.99; and £15.00 – £18.99. We tasted the wines in each price band together – but the company that sent in each wine wasn’t revealed until the end. That way, we could see without prejudice which supplier, if any, offered wines which were best suited to our individual preferences.

With a total of 16 wines to get through it was a fast and furious sampling session. We rated the wines from 0 and 10, from unspeakably disgusting to lifechangingly awesome. To calibrate our scores, we agreed that a score of 5 equated to an average, forgettable but inoffensive wine. A 6 was decent, but not worth buying; a 7 was a good wine that we would buy if we saw again at that price.

So how did they perform? Part of me was hoping this might be a dramatic David and Goliath tale of the little guy beating the bigger players. But the company that attracted the most number of points for its wines was the new kid in town… Naked Wines.

But there is a caveat: to get the prices that Naked Wines have quoted, you can’t simply buy a case like you can with the other suppliers. You have to be part of their Angel scheme, and commit to putting £20 into your Naked Wines account every month… you can find a more detailed description of how they operate in my previous post.

Here are some stats

Average score per wine across all four companies: 7.22/10

Average score for Naked Wines: 7.44

Average score for Virgin Wines: 7.42

Average score for Stone, Vine & Sun: 7.05

Average score for Laithwaite’s Wine: 6.95

So no individual supplier actually performed that badly; in fact, there wasn’t that much in it.

Number of top ranking wines across the four groups:

Naked Wines: 2 – Franck Massard ‘Herbis’ Verdejo 2011 (£6.99) with 7.19 points and Hacienda Don Hernan Rioja Reserva 2006 (£9.99) with 7.44 points.

Virgin Wines: 2 – The Big Mo’ Barossa Valley Shiraz 2009 (£12.99) with 8.69 points and Fromm La Strada Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2010 (£16.99) with 8.31 points.

Stone, Vine & Sun: 0

Laithwaite’s Wine: 0

It would seem that Naked Wines performed better at the cheaper end, and Virgin Wines were particularly strong with the more expensive bottles. The Big Mo’ Barossa Valley Shiraz 2009 from Virgin was the highest scoring wine of all, and they also supplied the second favourite – the Fromm La Strada Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2010.

…and number of bottom ranking wines across the four groups:

Naked Wines: 1 – Balthazar of the Barossa Shiraz 2007 (£17.99) with 7.94 points.

Virgin Wines: 1 – Blackfoot Daisy Pinot Grigio South Eastern Australia 2011 (£7.99) with 5.63 points.

Stone, Vine & Sun: 0

Laithwaite’s Wine: 2 – Keep Calm and Carignan Vin de France 2010 (£9.99) with 6.31 points and Tony Jordan Margaret River Zinfandel 2010 (£13.99) with 7.00 points.

The Keep Calm and Carignan was marked down by some people due to its label; of the other ‘least favourites’ two were still marked overall at 7 or above, so still a ‘would buy’, but the others in their group were preferred. There were two other wines that scored under 7, both of which were in the cheapest category: they were the Vicien Malbec 2009 from Stone, Vine & Sun with 5.88 points and the Viña Tarapacá Sauvignon Blanc 2011 with 6.44 points from Laithwaite’s Wine. This does mean however that two out of four Laithwaite’s Wine entries were considered ‘decent but not worth buying’.

Overall, the standard of the wines sent in was pretty good. Almost all of the wines sent in by the bigger three companies (Laithwaite’s Wine, Virgin and Naked) were either New World, or New World in style. So lots of crowd-pleasing, correctly-made wines with clean, intense fruit flavours and often a fair lick of oak. Stone, Vine & Sun were rather different and offered three Old World wines, and even their Malbec was surprisingly savoury. Perhaps including wines like these in the tasting was rather like putting on a few art-house or foreign films at the local cinema; a few people really loved them, but their subtlety was often overlooked in favour of the razzmatazz of the big-budget blockbusters.

This was a really fun tasting that gave us all a better idea of what these particular wine suppliers are all about. There are of course dozens of mail order and internet retailers out there, and many have a particular speciality. It’s just a case of finding which ones offer the kind of thing you like. What this tasting couldn’t tell us is what their service is like… the only way to find that out is to try them.

A few things always worth asking before you order from an internet or mail order wine company

• Is there a minimum order?
• Is there a delivery charge?
• What control do I have over delivery days/times/slots?
• Can I get a refund if I don’t like the wine?

Here is how the four companies that we tried out compare:

The wines in full

Thanks to Good Taste Food and Drink, the best food and drink shop in Crystal Palace, for letting us use their shop for the tasting. Thanks to Laithwaite’s Wine, Virgin Wines, Naked Wines and Stone, Vine & Sun for including their wines in the tasting.