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- Published: 01 August 2006 01 August 2006
I’ve read many times that the average spent on a bottle of wine in the UK is £4.00 (now, that’s cheap.) But what do you get for your money and if that’s all you spend; are you better off just buying a few cans of lager instead?
Every bottle of wine for sale in the UK attracts a certain number of fixed costs, but what are they? Each time you buy a bottle, £1.60 goes straight to the government in duty; you pay VAT on top of that and so on a £4 bottle the Chancellor gets another 60p. The wine has to be shipped into the UK, which will cost approximately 25p, the bottle, label and cork or screw-cap will cost a similar amount. In summary, to get it off the shelf, only £1.30 of what you pay contributes to the cost of the wine.
In a nutshell, when you spend £5 on wine, you get twice the wine you get for £4; spend £7 and get double what you get for a fiver. I’m sure there are flaws in this reasoning and exceptions to the rule, but I’d reckon four times out of five that you’d be making huge leaps in quality for modest increases in what you’re willing to pay.
But if you’re determined not to break the £4.00 threshold, what can you do? Probably best to grab a calculator and figure out if a 75cl bottle of wine at 13% abv will get you more drunk than a four pack of beer at 5%. Surely, when all you’re eventually spending on the wine is 65p, it can only be for one reason, and that’s more about getting drunk than about drinking.
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