Where to Buy Wine in Bath

By Ed Knaggs

Looking for a bottle of wine can be a daunting prospect. Inevitably you end up in front of an intimidating shelf stacked full of similar looking bottles with complicated names that often (particularly with French wines) won’t mention the grape variety that is lurking inside. Standing before it you can almost feel the passers-by look at you, muttering ‘They don’t know what they’re doing”, “They don’t know what any of this means”. Faced with this sheer wall of insurmountable choice, and imaginary sniggers it can be easier to move to the next shelf or aisle and pick up a case of beers, cider, or something soft. But before you move on, stop. You have come to this wall of mysteries for a reason. To pick out a wine. So take inspiration from Nike and Shia LeBeouf and ‘Just do it!’.

Having dealt with the anxiety of finding a bottle we now need to pause and go back a step. Where are you going to get this wine from? Will you go to the large supermarkets? To a specialist wine shop? Or your local off-licence? In Bath we are spoiled for choice. We have many excellent supermarkets, as well as their local/metro/convenient versions, a wide variety of alcohol/wine specialist shops, as well as a spattering of small corner shops and off-licences. This article is not an exhaustive list of all places you can buy a bottle of wine in town but it aims to guide you towards some of the key places and give you an idea of what to expect from each of them.

Supermarkets

In Bath you are always within walking distance of a major nationwide supermarket (See map below for locations). All of these supermarkets have a wine section in which it is possible to find excellent value wines. Supermarkets stock a wide range of wine qualities from the mass produced, cheap and cheerful bottles to £15+ wines that will usually be found in a ‘Fine wine’ section of shelves. This range makes supermarkets a very versatile place to buy wine. They can be your one-stop shop for most of your wine needs. However the supermarkets are limited; normally there is not a wine specialist on-hand to help guide you through the maze of bottles, and it is harder to find some of the more niche grape varieties and wines. Supermarkets offer a great opportunity to buy good value wines, a key consideration for any student buying wine. There are often bottles on sale at a discounted price.

If you are looking to try new varieties of wine but don’t want to spend lots of money only to find you don’t like the wine then supermarkets can help. There is often a ‘own-brand’ range of wines that offer good examples of many different styles of wine. In Sainsbury’s it is the Taste the Difference range, Waitrose has the inventively named Waitrose wines as well as the blueprint collection, Co-op and Tesco also have an eponymous wine range, and Lidl has the Winemaker’s selection. Marks and Spencer’s (M&S) are slightly different. Instead of offering a specific wine brand M&S have winemakers who make the wine for them under a variety of labels. This means that a majority of their wines are very good value and have an almost calibrated quality level.

Personally I love shopping for wine in Lidl. It is exciting. They regularly add to and change their line-up of wines, and have strange grapes from exciting regions. I have found some amazing bargains, my personal highlight being a Tokaji that regularly costs £40+ but was on sale in Lidl for £10. The range of wines is always good. All of the wines in Lidl’s Wine Cellar collection have been rated and reviewed by Lidl’s lead independent wine reviewer, Richard Bampfield MW. These reviews provide useful guidance from a man at the very top of the wine industry (MW stands for Master of Wine, he really knows his stuff).

Wine Shops

Wine shops can often seem more daunting than the supermarket wine shelf. It is easy to walk past them and assume that you need to be a wine expert or keen collector to enter the premises. This is as far from the truth as possible. The staff are very friendly and keen to talk about the wines in their shops and share their knowledge and passion with everyone. It is at this point I should mention that I have spent the weekends and holidays from university for the last year working in a wine shop so have a slightly biased view on the personality traits of wine retailers. But it has also shown me that the staff are extremely useful in navigating the weird and wonderful bottles in any shop, and also given me a sympathy for hours of standing around waiting for customers that they can go through. While it may seem like they are trying to make you spend all of your money, their main aim is that you find a wine you will enjoy and to talk about wine. Anything other than standing in silence. Another perk of shopping in specialist wine shops are bin end sales. When the vintages are changed over in a shop or space is needed for new stock in the cellars, the previous vintages are put on sale at a significantly reduced price normally up to 50% off the retail price. These bin end sales are a great opportunity to pick up wine at bargain prices. The best way to ensure you do not miss out on the bin end sales is to follow wine shops on social media or just regularly check in and ask the shop assistants about any good deals coming up.

Here is a brief overview of the main wine shops in Bath:

Great Western Wine (GWW), on Wells road, is a large spacious shop with knowledgeable, helpful staff. The wine varies from easy drinking bottles under £10 to rare and famous bottles at £100+. They have wine from all over the world from Europe to lesser known wine producing countries such as the Lebanon and Greece. As well as the wide range of wines GWW has a tasting counter where you can try before you buy. Another bonus as a student is that they offer a 10% discount to members of the University Wine Society.

Amathus on Green Street, just up the side road next to Belushi’s, is a small tightly packed shop filled with an excellent range of wines and spirits. They have wine from all over the world to fit with their motto of ‘Drinks to the World’. There is a well-stocked tasting section where you can try one of many different spirits on offer as well as their wines.

Le Vignoble in Milsom Place is both a wine bar and retail shop. The bar is a well-designed venue, that has great wine and also serves small plates. Its main USP are its Enomatic machines. The Enomatic machines keep the wine in a sealed environment and allow a bottle of wine to be sampled without the bottle deteriorating through exposure to oxygen. These are a great way to try the wines on offer for a fraction of the cost of the bottle. If you want to try a bottle that is out of your budget it is a great place to go. Wine can be bought by the bottle but if you want to drink it in Le Vignoble there is an £8 corkage (an extra charge for drinking the bottle there). Although Le Vignoble is probably out of most students everyday budget it is a great place to go if you want to treat yourself and if you are a member of the University Wine Society you get a 15% discount in store.

The Beckford Bottle Shop is another hybrid wine shop. It is a wine shop/restaurant/bar that offers a great spot for, if slightly more than student budget, drinks and food. The wine on offer, as with all of the wine shops in Bath, varies from easy drinking wines under £10 to fine wines for £40+. If you want to buy a bottle to drink in there is a £15 corkage, however the first Tuesday of every month is corkage free.

Majestic on Bear Flat, is a bit out of the way for most students but is another great place to buy wine (you may have noticed that in my opinion all wine shops are great places but the point is no less noteworthy). They have recently been in the news after various suggested rebrands and takeovers. The dust has settled and they have emerged with a new customer focused layout to their store. The wines have been divided into colours, with each colour representing a flavour profile. This is used to help recommend wines without the pretension or bravery required to otherwise spend money on a strange collection of letters and accents that is a novel wine for you. Paired with the colour systems is a ‘wine fitting’ service. This involves blind tasting 8 wines (4 red and 4 white) and rating them from ‘hated it’ to ‘loved it’. This fitting service is good fun, gets you free wine, and provides a pressure free way for you to find new options for wines you might enjoy.

Wolf Wine in Green Park Station is one of Bath’s newer wine shops. Although it is less of a shop and more of a shed. It is in one of the permanent stalls in green park station. Within their limited space they have managed to set up a full wine section, a bar, a section with other drinks (beer etc.), a refill station. At the refill station you can bring along an empty bottle and get it filled and re-filled with wine. This eco-friendly reusing scheme fits in very well with their craft theme. All of the wines in Wolf Wine are craft wines. They have lots of interesting and exciting natural, organic, and biodynamic wines. It is well worth a visit, and members of the Wine Society get a 10% discount.

Key advice

If you really don’t want to talk to a shop assistant, or there isn’t one available, apps like Vivino can be very useful. Vivino offers democratised wine reviews that can help picking between unknown wines. You scan the label and are provided with reviews by other users as well as lots of other information about the wine. However these reviews should not be taken as the whole truth, on Vivino Buckfast tonic wine has at least 4 star reviews across all vintages and is apparently amongst the top 1% of all wines in the world. The Wine Society has a Vivino account as well, where we list and rate all the wines we drink during our Society tastings, and more.

The main message in this article is don’t be shy, and try new things. Doing this will open up an exciting world in which you will always be able to find something new to explore. Try and keep track of what you have drunk and particularly what you have enjoyed and what you haven’t enjoyed. This will enable you to be more bold when you choose wine because you can have more certainty in your choice. Ask for help. If you are in a wine shop you are unlikely to know more about the products than the shop assistants, let them offer you advice and use your own knowledge and experience to make your final decisions. And above all enjoy it.

Come along to our weekly tastings or email su-winesoc@bath.ac.uk or find us on Facebook for more information.