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.
Highlights
The evolution of wine consumption in the UK is described by important socio-economic trends in consumer behavior that emerged in the 1950s
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 boundary products, why does UK wine consumption display the apparent reverse
Summary
The evolution of wine consumption in the UK is described by important socio-economic trends in consumer behavior that emerged in the 1950s This coincided with a growing awareness within the alcoholic beverages industry that there was the need for new product development to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated and aspirational consumer. Wine & Spirit Research (IWSR) predicts that the UK will be second only to the US in terms of the value of still wine sales by the end of 2018 [2] Crucial in this post-World War II evolution was a new entry firm that, taking its cue from the sophistication embodied in the Champagne category, developed a viable alternative from UK home-made perry (pear), which was targeted at women. 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
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