The Evolution of the UK Wine Market: From Niche to Mass-Market Appeal

Abstract

This article is an historic narrative account of the emergence of the mass-market wine category in the UK in the post-World War II era. The role of the former vertically-integrated brewing industry in the early stages of development is described from the perspective of both their distributional effects and their new product development initiatives. Significant in the narrative is the story of Babycham, the UK's answer to Champagne that was targeted to the new consumers of the 1950s; women. Then a specially-developed French wine, Le Piat D'Or, with its catchy advertising campaign, took the baton. These early brands were instrumental in extending the wine category, as beer continued its precipitous decline. That the UK is now one of the largest wine markets globally owes much to the success of these early brands and those that arrived later in the 1990s, with Australia displacing France as the source for mass-market appeal.Beverages 2018, 4, 87 2 of 12 industry that was controlled by the marketing and distribution platforms of the vertically-integrated UK brewers, and, as the domicile of the leading international spirits category, Scotch whisky, the UK is now one of the world's leading consumers of wine by both volume and value. Anchoring the article in the emerging literature encompassing resource partitioning theory, and adjoining recent wine research that has described the convergence in consumption patterns across the major developed economies, I seek to answer two inter-related questions: How did a market controlled by deeply-embedded brewing interests cede legitimacy to wine consumption, mindful that the UK was-and remains-a negligible wine producer. Given that resource partitioning theory implies an evolution from mass market to highly-differentiated (craft) boundary products, why does UK wine consumption display the apparent reverse. Theoretical BackgroundAs a function of history and an array of socio-economic and cultural norms, countries have been classified as wine, beer, or spirits consumer markets. The ability to cultivate the originating crops from which alcohol is derived, in addition to factors, such as taxation, have been important in underpinning the historic specificity of aggregate alcohol consumption. Recent detailed research investigating consumption patterns across the European Union, with its extensive mix of cultures, languages and agricultural traditions, shows that a process of convergence in drinking habits started some 50 years ago, predating the formation of the single market and other structural changes within the European Union [3]. Traditionally, consumer demand characteristics have been theorized largely from the perspective of industrial economics. The alcoholic beverages industry, and the beer industry specifically, has provided a rich empirical setting from which sophisticated consumer demand models have been proposed and tested, often with merger and antitrust policy [4-6], or more general macroeconomic and demographic policy [3,7], implications in mind. However, the micro-foun...