Victoria Moore: the best of Lidl's new cheap and chic French wine range

Following the success of last autumn’s highly publicised Claret Offensive, Lidl launches a new set of wines this week. As with the claret, this is effectively a pop-up wine range. Lidl UK has bought 1 million bottles in total, with 6,000-60,000 of each type of wine which, spread across 620 stores, means there isn’t a huge number to go around – but short availability is part of the deal here.

The here-now, gone-tomorrow, jump-in-quickly-if-you-want-to-take-part-because-when-they’re-gone-they’re-gone mentality creates deadline pressure and is germane to the immediacy and transience that are such big parts of our lives.

There are 40 different wines in Lidl’s new offer, all of them French, reflecting once again a desire to appeal to the most traditional instincts of the middle-class shopper. Are there any surprises? Well yes, quite a few. We emerged a decade or so ago from an era when mass-market wine had to be simple and obvious – shiraz and chardonnay from Australia, cabernet sauvignon from Chile, country red from Hungary.

Today the major supermarkets, including Tesco and Asda, which launched its “postcard” range earlier this year, routinely host esoteric bottles such as Georgian kvevri wine, Italian pecorino, Spanish bobal, Turkish red or Slovenian furmint. For M&S in particular, adventurous bottles are an important part of the brand and, as such, are funded through a new projects development budget rather than washing their faces, if bottles have faces, in their own right.

What Lidl has done is incredibly old-school. Strange wines are most often sold by grape and exotic country, and bottled under own-label as a way of holding the cautious drinker’s hand. Lidl by contrast has gone for obscure French regions.

“I didn’t just want obvious wines,” says buyer Ben Hulme. “I wanted to feel there was some real depth and points of interest.”

As with the claret, the French Offensive wines have been selected from a kind of giant wine buffet of 3,000 wines laid on in Paris by Lidl’s German HQ for the buyers who run the 10,000 stores in the 26 countries in which Lidl operates.

Alongside Lidl’s core wine range, which consists of fairly basic wines such as Australian cabernet and generic chianti along with the bestselling bottle (which, no surprises here, is prosecco), the French wines add a sense of savoir-faire. There is a pinot noir from Alsace, a fronsac (a much-unloved part of Bordeaux), a sauvignon de Saint-Bris, sparkling Crémant de Loire, white wine from the Savoie and Jurançon and even a fashionable Jura white.

About a quarter of the wines are worth a look; a handful of those are really very good, the strongest being a couple of extraordinarily well-priced and chosen sweet wines.

The main role of wine offers like this is to sprinkle a bit of stardust. Hulme says the 2014 claret offensive helped to increase wine sales across the board. Lidl recently announced that its wine sales had risen by 40 per cent year on year, taking its market share of off-trade sales in the UK to 4 per cent (worth more than £200 million).

The march of the discount stores through middle England is changing the way that more established retailers sell wine.

Both Aldi and Lidl concentrate on what’s known in the trade as EDLP – every day low price – rather than financial promotions. This has encouraged more established retailers to re-evaluate their own wine ranges, switching more bottles out of the model where price typically flips from £8.99 down to £6.99 twice a year, and into a lower price that is maintained at a constant level.

This is a good thing for drinkers, as it allows them to buy what they want, when they want, at a fair price. Supermarkets previously claimed it wasn’t possible to implement because shoppers said that’s what they wanted – and then only shopped the promotions.

A less welcome effect of the rise of the discount stores is that to push costs down, many bigger supermarkets are being forced to reduce not just the number of lines they carry but also the number of suppliers, which means a mass move towards wine mass-produced in bigger volumes and sold through huge global agents or companies.

The core Lidl range is tiny – fewer than 60 wines. But a sense of interest is maintained through promotions, like this French one, organised four times a year to refresh the look of the shelves and tickle the palates of shoppers coming through the door.

Wines to try

Domaine de Peyronnette 2014 Monbazillac

France (13%, Lidl, £7.99 for 75cl)Monbazillac is one of the less-known appellations making Sauternes-style sweet wines on the banks of the Dordogne river from sauvignon blanc, sémillon and muscadelle. This one is an absolute cracker. It tastes of frangipane, poached and baked apricots, and crème patissière. And you get a full bottle! For less than a tenner. Amazing.

Fiefs des Comelias Reuilly Cuvée Prestige 2014

France (12.5%, Lidl, £8.99)

Reuilly is a Sancerre satellite, which makes this another example of how buying a wine from a less famous name can cut you a good deal. Also, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, 2014 is a great Loire vintage. Fine sauvignon blanc, delicate and reminiscent of cut grass.

Serabel Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan 2014

France (14%, Lidl, £5.99)

A pretty decent damsons and dust red Côtes du Rhône blend for the price. I can’t tell you much about it thanks to a paucity of information on the wine – some bottles in the tasting were illegally labelled with no bottling information, though we were assured this was only because they were samples and would be remedied when they hit stores. This one’s worth a try, though.

• Browse our large range of French wines under £7 at Telegraph from Waitrose