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Tesco looks to double Finest wine sales by extending range to 100 lines

Published:  02 July, 2010

   Tesco is to extend its Finest wine range to 100 lines from 74 by the end of the year as it looks to celebrate 10 years of a brand now worth £1.1 billion across all grocery categtories by doubling Finest wine sales this year.

Tesco is to extend its Finest wine range to 100 lines from 74 by the end of the year as it looks to celebrate 10 years of a brand now worth £1.1 billion across all grocery categtories by doubling Finest wine sales this year.

To mark the anniversary Tesco is also releasing a limited range of wines, the Tesco Finest 2000 vintage, consisting of 14 wines, after an initial roll out of 10, which should be in stores within two weeks. The limited range will also for the first time make far more prominence of the winemakers involved in the wines, like Australia's Neil McGuigan, on the label.

Dan Jago, Tesco's head of beers, wines and spirits, said the crucial difference about Tesco's Finest wines are that these are "our wines" created by the Tesco team working with winemakers. These are not wines bought in or "made in partnership" with winemakers, he stressed.


Finest, he said, "was a great way of introducing innovation" to the wine category and giving customers the chance to try and experiment with grape varietals they may not have heard of or tried before.

Hence the new 2000 vintage range would be introducing customers to "mature wines they would not normally see".

It also demonstrated that price was not the over-riding factor in many customers decisions around wine. Finest, added Jago, also gives Tesco a "really powerful tool to break down some of the fears around wine" and provides a great opportunity to help educate consumers around wine.

It can be used more and more as a "experimental brand" to try new concepts and formats. He said, for example, he would like to see Finest in 50cl bottles and potentially other pack formats like PET.

"Finest is helping us to grow the wine category within Tesco as a whole," he stressed rather than take sales away from other branded areas.

The average price for a Tesco Finest wine now stands at £9.14 and he hoped to be able to put the lowest price point for a Finest wine up from £6 to £7.  He said a Tesco Finest wine may sell anything between 300 to 400 cases a year to 150,000.


Tesco also confirmed the arrival of Laura Jewell MW from Spar in August as one of its new product development managers.
Jago used the announcement to stess the importance of Tesco's new product development management team in setting the quality standards for the Finest range.

It is down to them to find the right grapes, the right blends and wineries to work with and it is then down to the buyers to negotiate all other factors around price and cost. The two roles were entirely separate, stressed Jago.

Strategic to trading up
Tesco sees Finest as an increasingly strategic brand in encouraging its customers to trade up in grocery categories right through the store. Sarah Bradbury, Tesco's food marketing director, revealed 63% of Tesco's own label customers will trade up to Finest including 82% of price sensitive customers. It was not, she stressed, just a brand for the the higher spenders with 24% of mainstream customers regularly buying Finest products.

Finest helped Tesco achieve 3.2% value growth in premium sales last year, compared to only a 0.3% growth in the overall UK premium retail sector.

Looking ahead Jago said he was particularly excited about the opportunities for Finest in areas such as Argentina, Chile and Spain.
He also confirmed plans to introduce by this time next year a range of 100 Tesco branded wines into all the 14 countries it is now present in apart from the US.

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