Tesco takes further steps to improve consumers’ engagement with wine

Tesco, which recently revamped its drinks fixture, is seeking better consumer engagement with wine by encouraging customers to come up with more ‘customer friendly and impartial’ wine descriptors.

The supermarket is ramping up its efforts to break down barriers between its consumers and wine. This latest initiative will see members of its Wine Community join online lifestyle writers to add a little more balance to its wine descriptions – which it admits are currently written by people who are “very close” to the wines.

It will hold a tasting at the end of the month, August 27, which will focus on 100 wines from its Finest range.

Guests will be asked to contribute ‘wine words’ which will be amalgamated to create a word cloud for each of the 100 wines.

Master of Wine Laura Jewell, who heads up the grocer’s wine product development, said: “We are aware that all the wine descriptions we use at Tesco come from people who are very close to the wines, whether they are the supplier, the winemaker or a member of the Tesco wine team. The team is keen to get descriptions from people tasting the wines with a more impartial point of view.”

Wine by the Case marketing manager Alison Purdie, said: “‘Ratings and Review’ - the peer to peer recommendation function on Wine by the Case, is hugely popular with our customers due to the conversational tone of the language used. The idea behind the ‘wine words’ tasting is to generate more everyday vocabulary that we can use when communicating with our customers about wine.”

Tesco is increasingly making efforts to communicate better with its wine consumers. Last month the supermarket heeded customer calls for increased variety in its Finest range by adding seven new lines to the selection. Newcomers to the range include classics such as Font Bonnet Medoc and St Chinian to quirkier Grechetto and Slovenian Riesling.

This move followed Tesco’s announcement it would offer consumers wine tastings – complete with ambassadors – in their own homes or community spaces. It is trialling 10 informal tastings over the next six months, with wines specially chosen according to the customer’s preferences and requests. The initiative is designed to make wine more accessible -  Alison Purdie, marketing manager for Tesco Wine by the Case, said wine can still be “daunting to the majority of people”.