Super deals on wine
Once a year in France, shoppers stock their supermarket trolleys with their favourite wines as deals abound during the Foires au vins.
MY friends are always under the impression that since I lived in France for a number of years, I would have drunk my way through the great wines of France. How untrue.
When I was in France, I was a poor student. Most of my wine purchases would be from supermarkets where I shopped for groceries and I would not spend more than € 5 per bottle. In fact, I often only paid about € 2 per bottle. It was fun trying lots of cheap wines to find out which ones delivered value.
However, there would be one time every year when I would splash out - and that was during the Annual French Supermarket wine fair called the Foires au vins.
Each year, from late September to early October, post-boxes in France are crammed with flyers as thick as catalogues advertising a wine fair hosted by the country¡¯s major supermarket chains over the period of a week each. With more than five supermarket chains, all taking part at different times, the wine lover can stock up his/her cellar over a number of weeks!
Wine buyers on the lookout for bargains take delight in studying the offers, for unlike the village or local wine shop, the supermarkets, with their buying power, will have negotiated for top quality wines at very low prices. You will see wines such as Chateau Margaux, Hospices de Beaune, Cote Rotie and the like, all available at bargain prices.
The supermarkets, however, do not sell aged wines, due to their first-in, first out policy. What you¡¯ll find is wine for future drinking and some table wines for everyday drinking.
The idea of selling wine in a supermarket originated with the Leclerc supermarkets of Brittany in north-west France. The chain held its first wine fair in 1973 and today, reports say it sells over 200 million bottles of wine per annum!
Supermarket wine fairs became quite widespread about 15 years ago. It all began during the difficult period experienced by the Bordelaise producers in the years of 1993 and 1994, and supermarkets offered to take wine bottles off the hands of producers and offer them to their customers at a small mark up. As the markets recovered, the supermarkets began to offer wines from lesser-known appellations, having made a name in retailing good wines at good prices.
Take for example the Languedoc region. Only a few years ago, the supermarkets began selling its wines and the Languedoc Promotion Board reported that the region¡¯s wine sales first increased in volume by 8%, and then jumped to more than 30% , suggesting the difference in sales came from the supermarkets.
Similarly, if you like Bordeaux, the supermarket will have offers on classified growths too. This is because the Bordeaux estates, including the first growths, have a much larger output (usually 100,000 bottles per annum) than the miniscule production of several thousand bottles found in Burgundy.
I visited France earlier this month and enviously watched as the many wine lovers filled their trolleys with wine. I admit I was tempted to toss out all my clothes and fill my suitcase with some of these wines.