Majestic Wine, the UK’s largest wine retailer, are set to review their English Wine range following the success of their recent Parcel Series English Sparkling Wine, which was introduced as a one-off “When It’s Gone, It’s Gone” parcel (reviewed in our February Round-Up).
Majestic will be looking for new arrivals from England’s burgeoning wine scene over the next 12 months. Priced at just £22.48 (Mix Six), the Parcel Series wine had striking autolytic complexity and if being used as a benchmark of Majestic’s ambition in the category, shows great promise for the upcoming additions to the range.
As outlined in a Guardian article on the performance of English Sparkling Wine at Majestic: while Champagne sales showed a decline over the festive period, sales of Nyetimber and Chapel Down rose by 58% and 36% respectively.
Even more impressively, sales of English Fizz at sister company Naked Wines rose 150% from the previous year.
Our very own writer Andrij Jurkiw is to begin working alongside Majestic’s buying team as a Product Consultant on English Wine. He’ll be teaming up with Sparkling Buyer James Reed and English still wine buyer Imogen Bowen-Davies to give his insight, as part of a long-term range review. We hear that an initial tasting of wines submitted by English producers has been concluded, but no specific details are available at this time.
Andrij told us, “It has been a great privilege to be involved in this expansion of the English Wine range. The quality and availability of English Wine has increased greatly over the past few years and having witnessed a marked increase in sales on the retail side of the business, I’m delighted that Majestic are looking to bring in such exciting additions over the coming year.”
Good luck to Andrij with his involvement in this exciting expansion and we eagerly await further news of further upcoming product launches.
