Enjoy browsing the UK's finest selection of premium wines, mixed cases, wine gifts and much more! Masi - Rosa dei Masi della Venezie ... Bodega Norton - Winemaker's Reserve... Glaetzer - Wallace 2015 Errazuriz - Wild Ferment Chardonnay... Concha Y Toro - Casillero del Diabl... D'Arenberg - The Dead Arm Shiraz 2002 Clarendon Hills - Cabernet Sauvignon, Hi... Domaine Philippe Colin - Chassagne Montr... Domaine Bachelet-Monnot - Puligny-Montra...Buy 6 or more bottles and we'll deliver straight to your door! Welcome to your local Majestic Store If you've never visited a Majestic store you might be surprised. We're not like a traditional off-licence; our stores are large, with bottles displayed on boxes, tasting notes for every wine, and an impressive display of fine wines. You'll find a prominent tasting counter (help yourself!), and of course a member of the Majestic team to greet you and help carry your purchases to your car (parked for free, right outside).

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We’re not in New South Wales but Avonmouth, the port on the edge of Bristol. wine grapes for sale aucklandThe bottling plant, owned by Accolade (formerly Constellation Wines), is the biggest of a handful around the country that receive wine shipped in vast flexi-tanks and repackage it into bottles and boxes destined for supermarket shelves. The phenomenon of “The Incredible Bulk”, as it has been called, has led to global bulk wine exports rising from 560 million to 1.24 billion litres in a decade, according to Rabobank which published a report on the subject, noting that the main demand comes from Britain, Germany, the United States and China. You can tell if your wine has been bottled on these shores because the label on the back must by law announce it, though it usually does so in minuscule print. Chances are if you buy wine in supermarkets you will have had one. Accolade in Avonmouth bottles not just its own brands (which include Hardy’s and Echo Falls) but also those of Treasury Wine Estates (who own Lindeman’s and Beringer), Sainsbury’s and Morrisons.

Last February Asda became the first retailer to own its own UK bottling plant, in Norfolk. Greencroft Bottling in Co Durham packs around 100 million litres a year that go into pub groups as well as retailers. Tesco, which estimates that about a quarter of all the wine it sells has been bottled on these shores, uses a facility near the Manchester Ship Canal in Cheshire. You may have seen its head of wine (a former naval officer) on Gregg Wallace’s Supermarket Secrets standing astride a barge and prodding the large 24,000-litre polypropylene bags in which the stuff arrives, “Look! It’s vacuum-packed so it feels completely solid.” My more acidic colleagues have been teasing him about his “performance on HMS Plonk”. Bulk wine arrives here from the New World, principally Chile and Australia but also Argentina, South Africa, the US and New Zealand. By necessity – it is moved in 24,000 and 26,000-litre tanks – it must have been produced in high volume. Almost exclusively, then, the cheap stuff.

Last year the average value of Australian wine exported here in bottles was A$3.82 (£2.02) a litre against the bulk average of A$1.06 (56p) per litre (those are FOB – free on board – costs; that is, the cost of the packaged wine before shipping). It’s a practice that allows supermarkets to create their own brands from leftovers in glut harvests. It also gives flexibility in packaging and marketing (sizes, the chance to shout about a competition medal), as Concha y Toro, the Chilean producer that imports Frontera and Isla Negra in bulk, points out. Some also cite environmental concerns. In truth, the decision not to move heavy glass around the world is not about being green, it’s about cost. Oversupply coupled with extravagantly high duty (57 per cent of the cost of the average £5 bottle sold in this country is pure tax) means that anyone hoping to sell wine here must make every single penny really earn its keep. “Bulk shipping is contentious in South Africa because it takes work away from the glass and bottling industries,” says Jo Wehring of Wines of South Africa (WOSA).

“The reality, though, is that if you’re not competitive you’re going to lose market share and that will also lead to a loss of jobs.” Last year 64 per cent of South Africa’s wine exports to Britain arrived here as bulk wine; in 2012 it was 67 per cent, but a weak rand last year underwrote a slight drift back to bottling at source. For other countries the trend continues to gather pace: bottled wine exports from Australia to Britain fell by 19 per cent last year against a drop of four per cent for bulk, according to a new report, which fingers the “continued shift to exporting in bulk” for the difference in performance. What should we think about the quality of wine that is bottled here? It is true that, even if their volumes permitted it, you would not catch artisan or fine wine producers letting their baby leave the winery in a giant bag to be messed around with by someone else in another time zone. Bulk shipping can make wine taste a bit flat. But I don’t believe bottling in Britain is necessarily against the cheap-wine-drinker’s interests.

Such commercial wines tend to be more stable and intert, so less likely to spoil. Fierce competition means savings in shipping costs go into the wine, not the producer or retailer’s pocket. Also, technological developments have finessed the process. For example, oxidation is a threat but Accolade claims that wine now picks up less than 0.1 parts per million of oxygen when it is transferred into bottles. “The monitoring of quality is now vastly more intricate,” says WOSA’s Wehring. “Bottled samples are sent back to the Wine & Spirits Board in South Africa who check that the chemical analysis of the product going to the consumer is the same as it was when it left the winery.” Mark Jarman of Morrisons also points out that wine bulk-shipped across the equator is less prone to heat spoilage, as “the mass of liquid reduces the temperature variances. This is particularly helpful if a ship is held up in port in the Far East.” In conclusion, on, a mixed bag. I’d never be thrilled to see the words, “bottled in the UK” but it’s not always bad news.