How to beat ‘crapflation’ in the wine industry

During the apparently never-ending cost-of-living crisis, retailers and their suppliers have come up with various ways of passing on the costs without losing their profits. The first and most obvious may be crude, blunt and annoying for shoppers, but it at least has the virtue of being honest: they simply put up prices as much as they think we can bear.

The second is more insidious: the underhand, sanity-undermining tactic known as shrinkflation, those subtle changes in the size or weight of a pack, introduced on the sly, that give you the uncanny sensation your hands have grown, or your housemate’s been at your biscuits.

This is slightly different to a third option, “crapflation” (well that’s what I call it), which entails keeping the same price and size of pack, but making the product ever so slightly worse by subbing in cheaper ingredients: fewer dried strawberries in your granola; chocolate-flavoured, rather than chocolate, that sort of barely perceptible, slowly joy-sapping thing.

After tasting a lot of their wines at spring and summer range press tastings over the past couple of months, I’ve decided that supermarket wine-buying departments, which are still for the most part wedded to the 75cl bottle, have largely settled on methods one and, increasingly, three as they battle with their own price pressures, which, to be fair to them, are even more severe than those faced by their colleagues working with other products.

Duty is largely responsible for that. According to the Wine and Spirit Trade Association lobby group, the duty on a 14.5% abv bottle of wine has gone up by £1.10 since the government brought in its new, variable rate of duty, based on alcoholic strength, in 2023. This comes on top of another new tax, the Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging (EPR) levy, a charge designed to pass the cost of dealing with packaging from the local taxpayer to the producer. Applied to all food and drink products for the past 18 months, the WSTA says it’s added a further 12p to the cost of a 75cl bottle of wine.

Given that wine producers are also struggling with the same rampant inflationary effects on transport and goods used in their production and packaging as every other food and drink producer, it’s no wonder that supermarkets are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the sort of prices that their customers are comfortable with. Once all the fixed costs (duty, VAT, packaging and logistics) plus the usual retailer and supplier margin have been deducted, the amount left over to pay for the actual wine in a bottle priced at around the UK retail average of £7 has dwindled to around 60p.

Over the past four years in the supermarkets, there’s been a neat, almost linear effect, whereby wines that have held their price have got steadily, perceptibly worse at more or less the rate of inflation. At the same time, my internal price-quality-value meter has struggled to keep up with persistent price rises. Wines that I taste blind and instinctively think “that’s £7.99” are now more likely to weigh in above £10.

But if it’s never been harder to sell decent wine at £10 and below, it’s by no means impossible. There’s no sense of dipping quality in the wines that the German winemaker Gerd Stepp makes in the Pfalz region for his former employer Marks & Spencer, for example: both the sleekly racy, dry white M&S Classics No.2 Riesling, Pfalz 2025 and the polished red berries and subtly forest-earthy scents of the red M&S Palataia Pinot Noir, Pfalz 2024 are ideal summer wines for exactly £10. And, for the time being at least, the blossomy-floral, peachy fresh 2 Banks Winery Assyrtiko & Malagouzia, Central Greece 2025 (£8.50, Tesco), the brightly dark-berried unoaked Portuguese red, Co-op Irresistible Douro 2024 (£9.50), and the tingling, citrus-zesty dry white Waitrose Loved & Found Carricante, Sicily, Italy 2025 (£9.50) show no signs of giving in to the seemingly irresistible forces of crapflation, either.