“Naked Wines has achieved a record £100 million in sales since March 2015…”
I utterly fail to see how this business can be this profitable given how horrible their wines are.
I think the main issue with them, is that no wine they sell is available anywhere else in the market. Which means these wines are usually private labels.
Even though the prices are incomparable they still claim a HUGE discount over MSRP or Retail pricing.
So I’ve been the recipient of two cases. Both have been mixed.
I too had this experience:
Customer service = A+
Ordering and website = A
Shipping/processing = A
Actual Quality of wine = D
To be honest, I would rather drink two buck chuck at TJs or boxed wine than a lot of their wines.
Most of the reds I tried had residual sugar, high alcohol and a bad nose and palate. The reds were just AWFUL. I’ve taken them to parties where there are non-wine drinker wines and even they didn’t bite.
To be fair, there have been a few whites that were serviceable for the price.
so if you must try…try the whites.
There are alternatives to this kind of club:
It is not as cheap as the Angels site, but the product should be substantially better. I have not had any of the wines - I just stumbled upon the website recently.
Don’t confuse profits with sales. The article didn’t claim they were profitable, it stated they’d had 100 million GBP in sales over a given time period. That may have been profitable, it may not.
Bottom line is a tricky stat in any business (and can mean different things) but they have a very healthy gross profit margin of 29% - which is very good in this business, especially for a self proclaimed price leader…
See old financial data on them from a bond offering they did…
Source: http://d188lsrzmu20wi.cloudfront.net/media/pdfs/naked-fine-wine-bond-doc-v1.pdf
All I know is that the voucher price gives you a bunch of $6 wines, and you figure the worst you get is a bunch of cooking wine. Then you cook a lot and realize the ongoing prices are not in the cooking wine range. Experiment over.
Exactly. Not only are we used to and looking for better wines than those, but we actually have the knowledge to identify and to locate better wines even at low price points. If you told me to seek out decent wines at $6/bottle for some party or wedding reception, I could do it, and I’m 99% sure I’d come up with wines better than you get from some outfit like this.
For those who want to spend $6 a bottle and are perfectly happy with wines in that price range from Trader Joe’s, Pier One Imports, and so forth, and who don’t want to invest the time and effort to learn about which are the best wines out there at those prices and how to get them, maybe it makes sense for them, and if so, that’s great.
This 2016 Bellesa Perfecta [Priorato] has been sitting on the kitchen racks for a while and seems to be some kind of Naked Wines wine. I’ve never bought anything from them, and am fuzzy on how this showed up here, but that small diamond rack is where random/oddballs go. 14.5% abv according to the label, which also seems to mention Franck Massard. The wine is pretty lousy, especially when compared to the two good Priorats I had last week. I think this is some byproduct blend of various leftovers that can be vintage labeled and DOC flagged, and then is sent off to American wine clubs and that ilk. There is a harsh, hot, metallic licorice note. I believe the wine is sound, just crummy. I struggled through a glass while stirring a Barcelona style stew, and then froze the rest of the bottle to use for cooking, or more likely … dumping. This 2016 merits a C in my ledger. One curious thing - it has a full real cork, with red tartrate crystals on the wine facing end; I hardly ever see those forming on reds.
Assuming this is emblematic of Naked Wines lineup…avoid them. But I would not expect WB to be in that space/price points.
Dinner went well with crusty buttery bread though!
My brother belongs to the Naked Wines list and has blinded me on a bunch of the bottles in the last couple of years. There have actually been a few nice wines in the $15/btl range, but have also been some undrinkable bottles, including a CdP that I think was around $35 in the club. Looking at my notes on CT, it looks like I enjoyed Daryl Rex Groom DCV Zinfandel and a Jaqueline Bahue Cabernet Franc from Lodi that was pretty decent. If I had to put a number on it, the percentage of decent Naked Wine bottles that I’ve tried is probably 25%.
They work with some very good winemakers - the question is whether the fruit they are sourcing allows the winemakers to show off what they do . . .
As with all of these, it’s best to try before you buy - but that is not possible with their model
Cheers
I’ve thought about making a pitch to NW but I don’t know. Here’s the deal for winemakers: once they agree to your proposal, they provide all the upfront funding to make the wine. Then they handle all sales and set the pricing based on cost information/“profit” for the winemaker. But you can only sell the wine through NW. I would not be able to offer it to our wine club members, or offer it on our website. Weighing the pros and cons, but I haven’t decided on a project that I don’t want to offer our wine club and our distribution sales partners.
But basically, this is one key reason you will not see much information about these wines outside the NW website.
I’ve been selling Pinot to Naked for a few years. Look for Derek Rohlffs Pinot from Anderson Valley or Matt Parrish Anderson Valley Pinot. Those guys ARE the winemaker and the wines are either crushed in Kenwood or Napa. Pretty easy to work with and the check comes on time. I had one of Derek’s Pinots and it was quite good.
It might be different in the US, but in the UK NW have mostly exclusive names. As long as the wine is bottled with that NW name and that wine is not sold with the same name elsewhere then wineries sell wines to others - whether the contents of the bottle are the same - who (apart from the winery) knows. But the NW customer cannot compare prices, and the winery might sell the wine with a different label at a different retail price.
1 Like