How much should you spend on a bottle of wine?

At the cheapest end, the maths really is difficult

Take a 750ml bottle at 12.5% alcohol.

Using UK Alcohol Duty rates in force from 1 February 2026, the bottle carries about £2.87 in alcohol duty before we get anywhere near the cost of making, importing or selling it.

VAT matters too. On a £10 shelf price, £1.67 is VAT.

So before the bottle, closure, label, freight, importer, retailer or wine itself have been paid for, £4.54 of that £10 has already gone in tax.

At £8, about £4.20 is tax. More than half the shelf price.

At £15, the equivalent figure is about £5.37.

Duty depends on the amount of alcohol in the bottle, not how expensive the bottle is. So if two wines have the same strength, moving up in price does not mean repeatedly paying the same fixed duty again.

As the shelf price rises, more of each extra pound is left for everything else.

That does not mean every extra pound reaches a vineyard. Retail margins, transport, packaging and other costs still have to come out of it. But it creates room that simply does not exist in the same way at the very bottom of the market.

This is the strongest reason not to shop for wine purely by finding the lowest possible number on the shelf.

More expensive does not automatically mean more enjoyable

The other half of the story matters just as much.

In one study involving more than 6,000 blind wine tastings, people without wine training did not enjoy more expensive wines more. On average, the relationship between price and enjoyment was actually slightly negative.

Other blind-tasting research has found much the same thing: knowing that one bottle costs substantially more than another is not a reliable way of predicting which one somebody will enjoy most when the prices disappear.

That does not prove that cheap and expensive wine are equivalent.

It proves something narrower and more useful: price is not a pleasure score.

Expensive wines can involve costly farming, tiny yields, difficult vineyards, more labour, longer ageing or genuinely scarce material. They may cost more to farm, make or age. They may also come from places where very little wine can be produced.

But they can also cost more because the producer is famous, the vineyard is coveted, supply is tiny or demand is enormous.

Those things can be worth paying for.

They just do not guarantee that you will enjoy the wine proportionately more tonight.

So what should you actually spend?

If you want one number for ordinary retail buying in Britain, about £15 is a sensible place to start.

Not a minimum. Not a guarantee. A starting point.

At around £12–£18, you have moved far enough away from the cheapest part of the market that tax is no longer swallowing anything like the same proportion of the shelf price, without moving into genuinely expensive wine.

That is where I would begin if someone walked into a shop and simply said: I want a good bottle of wine and I do not want to waste money.

Below £10, I would be more selective rather than dismissive. Good wines exist there, particularly from large producers, efficient regions, supermarket own-label programmes and good promotions. But the economics are tight enough that I would not make the cheapest shelf my default hunting ground.

Between roughly £18 and £30, spending more can be useful when you want something more specific.

Perhaps you want a smaller producer. A particular village. An older wine. A style that requires more expensive farming or longer ageing. A bottle from a place where land itself is costly.

This is where the question changes from:

Will spending more help?

to:

What do I want the extra money to buy?

Above £30, that question becomes even more important.

There are wonderful wines at £40, £80 and £200. There are also mediocre ones.

The further you move up the price scale, the less sensible it becomes to treat price alone as reassurance. You may be paying for rarity, reputation, age, collectability, a particular vineyard or simply very expensive production.

All can be legitimate.

But if you cannot explain why this bottle costs £60 rather than £25, the price itself is not a good enough answer.

A supermarket or a wine merchant?

Neither automatically wins.

Large supermarkets can buy enormous quantities, negotiate hard and commission very good own-label wines. At modest budgets, that scale can be useful.

Independent merchants are often useful for a different reason: selection.

They can justify stocking smaller producers, less familiar regions and wines that do not need to sell thousands of bottles a week. A good merchant can also tell you where the money is going.

That advice becomes increasingly valuable once you move beyond buying a familiar £10 bottle and start spending £20 or £30 on something you do not know.

So I would not ask whether supermarkets or independents offer better value in general.

Ask what you need from the shop.

If you know exactly what you want, price matters.

If you do not, curation has value too.

Restaurants are a different calculation

Do not take these retail numbers into a restaurant and expect them to translate neatly.

Restaurant wine prices include an entirely different business model: staff, service, storage, glassware, rent and the economics of running a dining room.

Mark-ups vary widely, so there is no reliable multiplier you can apply to every wine list.

That means a £40 bottle on a restaurant list is not the same buying decision as a £40 bottle in a shop.

The better approach is not to reverse-engineer every bottle into its retail price. Decide what you are comfortable spending, then use the list intelligently.

There is no prize for spending more

Wine pricing attracts two equally unhelpful ideas.

One says expensive wine must be better.

The other says anyone buying expensive wine has been fooled.

Neither survives much scrutiny.

A £12 bottle can be excellent because somebody made good decisions at scale in an inexpensive place.

A £100 bottle can be worth £100 because it comes from somewhere extraordinary, took years to make and exists in tiny quantities.

And either one can disappoint you.

So the useful question is not:

How expensive should my wine be?

It is:

What is the extra money buying me?

If the answer is better farming, a producer you care about, a place you want to understand, age, rarity or simply a bottle you particularly want to drink, spend it.

If the answer is only that the number on the label is bigger, keep your money.

Sources

1. HM Revenue & Customs, Alcohol Duty rates (GOV.UK): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates
2. HM Revenue & Customs, VAT guide (VAT Notice 700) (GOV.UK): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-guide-notice-700
3. Robin Goldstein, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, John W. Emerson, Alexis Herschkowitsch and Jacob Katz, “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings”, Journal of Wine Economics, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 1–9: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1931436100000523
4. Robert H. Ashton, “Wine as an Experience Good: Price Versus Enjoyment in Blind Tastings of Expensive and Inexpensive Wines”, Journal of Wine Economics, Volume 9, Issue 2, 2014, pp. 171–182: https://doi.org/10.1017/jwe.2014.7