Majestic and Tesco duke it out

With Christmas on the horizon, we take a look at who is set to make the most of the season

AS THE LEAVES begin to fall and thoughts turn to the Christmas drinking season, the wine trade promotional engines kick into top gear.  Autumn tastings can make (and in some cases break) the reputation of a country, a retailer or an individual brand owner.

October’s press mentions, therefore, should be interpreted as the opening shot of the season.  On this basis the omens are good for Majestic, Tesco and Thresher, while M&S, Safeway and Oddbins may be in for a more difficult time.

Correspondingly France, South Africa and Spain appear to be doing the business, while Italy, Chile and Argentina may be in for a tougher season.  Let’s take the retailers first.

Both Majestic and Tesco have put serious effort into courting the wine press in recent months, and this appears to be paying off: both retailers took 10% of mentions each, with Majestic just shading it to be the top retailer for the month.

Of the two, perhaps Tesco was the more consistent performer.  The Observer was its best advocate in October, mentioning the retailer eight times, but the good news for Tesco was that its 30 press mentions were quite spread around, with most newspapers citing it at least twice.

Majestic on the other hand benefited from being "Glucked", that is having a column devoted to it in Malcolm Gluck’s widely-read Superplonk column.  While it is easy to ignore France’s dominance of the mentions (34% in October) it is worth remembering that France – in the off-trade at least – is now an also-ran to Australia in both volume and value terms.

Either the wine writers are wilfully ignoring the market sentiment, or (perhaps more likely) the readership of their columns is still heavily biased in favour of the product from across la Manche.

Either way, the fact that French wine is still the most talked about wine product in the UK should go some way to improving the mood of les Français about the culture, or lack of it, in their largest export market.

Perhaps the most expected result of October’s In the Press is the improvement in the fortunes of South African wine.  Products from this country secured just over 11% of all mentions, placing it third for the month behind France and Australia.

The main reason for this improvement is likely to have been the significant effort put in by Wines of South Africa (WoSA) and its brandowner membership as part of the "Explore a Different World" campaign.

While the plaudits were reasonably well spread out, it was the Guardian-Observer axis that proved particularly fertile hunting ground.  Spain was October’s dark horse.

The country got a number of mentions across more popular newspapers (Daily Mail, Express) and also featured strongly in Gluck’s copy in The Guardian. 

Looking at the long-term trends, and the imminence of Christmas, it is probably the moment for this column to make some predictions for next year.

Here they are:

• The number of wines mentioned in press articles will stabilise, having fallen for most of 2002 and the first half of 2003 as wine columns were shrunk or killed off entirely

• France and Australia will maintain parity, but South Africa will overtake Italy to be the number three country-brand in the press mentions hierarchy

• Having seen off Oddbins and Sainsbury’s in 2003, Tesco will challenge Waitrose for the "most popular retailer" slot in 2004

• The Thresher revival will continue That’s enough predictions for us to get at least one right over the next 12 months.