"£17 to £21 for a bottle of Merlot! Who are you kidding?"
A follower asked us that, and it's a fair question. So let's do the maths on a £10 bottle first.
According to a Sunday Times breakdown by wine writer Will Lyons (2 September 2026), a £10 bottle has £1.93 left for the wine. That has to pay for the grapes, the farming and the winemaker. The Treasury takes £4.77 of the same bottle, before a single grape is paid for.
At Vivan, it is different. Across our winemakers, roughly a third of what you pay for a case goes straight to the person who made the wine, about £7 to £9 a bottle.
On a typical £10 bottle, under a fifth is wine.
Where your £10 goes
| Slice of a £10 bottle (13.5% ABV) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Tax: alcohol duty £3.10 + VAT £1.67 | £4.77 |
| Retailer margin | £2.00 |
| Farming and making the wine | £1.93 |
| Packaging (glass, closure, labels) | 75p |
| Shipping and logistics | 40p |
| Extended producer responsibility (EPR) | 15p |
That is 47.7% tax. The rest is squeezed around a very small amount of wine.
Why the wine gets squeezed first
Tax and the glass bottle do not care what is inside. Lyons notes that shipping a bottle "that costs £5 or £100 remains the same", and the 2023 switch to strength-based duty plus the new EPR packaging charge added more fixed cost on top. On a cheap bottle, the only thing left to cut is the wine.
His own conclusion: the sweet spot used to be £8 to £12. Now he puts it at £15 to £20 in a wine shop, the point where you spend more on the wine than on tax.
Twice the price, over three times the wine
Here is the twist. Duty, glass and transport cost about the same whether a bottle is cheap or brilliant. VAT rises with the price, but it stays a fixed share.
Bibendum's Autumn 2025 Vinonomics breakdown shows what that does. In its £10 bottle, £1.98 is wine. In its £20 bottle, £6.22 is wine.
Twice the price, over three times the wine.
So cheap wine isn't really cheaper.
You just get less wine...
What we can and can't change
We can't change duty. We can't change VAT. We can't make glass cheaper.
What we can change is the middle. Vivan is the importer, so there is no separate warehouse, no distributor and no chain of middlemen each taking a cut. The winemaker packs your case, and it comes to you.
That is why far more of what you pay ends up with the winemaker. Across our winemakers, roughly a third of the price of a case goes straight to the person who grew the grapes and made the wine.
A social enterprise that believes in fair pay
Vivan is a not-for-profit cooperative and a social enterprise. We believe winemakers should be paid fairly for the grapes they grow and the wine they make, and that you should be able to see where your money goes.
That is the whole idea: independent winemakers, organic farming, and a fair share for the people who do the work.
Meet the independent winemakers behind our wines → vivan.coop
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