I am regularly sort of tempted by Laithwaites bargain cases. I then go online and start searching some German, Italian and Spanish websites and I cannot find any of the wines, and usually not even producers. Sometimes I can, then the producer does not list the particular wine at all.
When you go to say Majestic, this is different. Their wines are from wineries that exist, can be traced and the wines usually exist abroad as well. Therefore, I can double check before allowing Ripoff-Britain to get the better of me. You can also double check their Calais price to find out what proportion of your money goes to Gordon Brown.
The way I usually buy wine in this country is by checking Euro prices; if I can beat a reputable supplier in Germany for a bottle of Chianti I buy it. If I cannot, I dream about my next booze cruise and drink up what I have in my cellar (too bad Dover is 250 miles away from where I am).
But as I said, Laithwaites cheaper stuff simply does not exist anywhere outside the UK. My suspicion is that the way they operate is not by buying bottles of named and known wines, but by buying huge quantities of noname wines in casks, to then basically commission their own wines and labels. That makes market transparency impossible and you can never know whether you get value for money. If they operate anything like olive oil merchants, they might even sell an Italian cabernet made from imported Bulgarian grapes. Does anyone know more about this or am I simply wrong?
Fred