Last year, an Asda wine clinched an unusual victory after it beat 16,000 rivals in a blind taste test, winning the prestigious Decanter World Wine Awards competition.
The budget bottle of La Moneda Reserva Malbec from the supermarket giant costed a wallet-friendly £4.37 on a rollback deal and emerged as the surprise winner in the ‘single-variety red costing under 15 pounds’ category in Decanter’s annual World Wine Awards.
Consumer demand crashed the website of Asda supermarkets following the win, leading its parent company Walmart to start selling the wine at $6.96 a bottle in the United States.
Now The Washington Post has revealed the reason why one of the world’s best-rated wines ended up on the shelves of Asda in the UK and Walmart in the US at such a bargain price.
According to them, the moreish Malbec is produced by Chile’s largest wine exporter Ranco Wines, which has over 2,500 acres of vineyard in the South American country, and ships more than 80 million liters a year to more than 25 countries.
You’re probably picturing your bottle of red being created in oak barrels in a pretty little vineyard, but the reality is much less romantic. Most wine is an industrial agricultural product, made a huge stainless-steel “tank farms” that can hold gallons of liquid.
Economy of scale can help make wine, even good wine, inexpensive by producing it in huge bulk batches and selling it on to large retailers.
In the case of La Moneda, the wine was shipped to the UK bottled on UK shores, drastically reducing the price.
For sales in the US, the wine is bottled in Chile but once it is exported, the buyers at shops like Walmart (who told The Post they bought up all of the La Moneda) use a few smart marketing tricks to send sales of private-label wine high while the cost of shipping it to their shelves stays relatively low.
The first trick they use is to come up with a good name, in this case ‘La Moneda’ - which means coin in Spanish.
Then, because it is going exclusively to one store’s various outlets, there’s no marketing cost involved to build the brand and fight for shelf space.
When at the store, Walmart and Asda will give the wine a prime spot on the shelves - at eye level and easy reach - while well-known brands are often relegated to less-visible, harder-to-reach shelves.
So the good news for you is that if you’re on the hunt for a bottle of La Moneda, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.
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