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.