Wine at €1.89 a bottle at Lidl: “It’s a disgrace, it should be banned”

Selling for €1.89 a bottle at Lidl, a bargain-basement Bordeaux is provoking anger among winegrowers and some consumers. Chef Yves Camdeborde is taking to the streets to speak out at the GG on Tuesday, September 5.

After the 29-cent baguette , here comes wine for less than 2 euros. Lidl has put a bottle of Bordeaux on its shelves for 1.89 euros, an offer that has angered winegrowers, right in the middle of the grape harvest.

Customers, for their part, are divided over a "low-cost" bottle. At that price, the promotion is intriguing. But consumers are far from unanimous. Between the lure of the low price and the fear of a lower-quality wine, many are thinking primarily of "the producers," the first to be impacted by this price war. And behind the €1.89 price tag, the losses are real for the producers.

In reality, some winegrowers have to sell off their stock to make room for the new harvest. This is what Thierry explains in Les Grandes Gueules: “I have a lot of colleagues who have stock and don't know what to do with it and who resell it for €1.89. So, it's not necessarily cheap. Those who really have stock aren't necessarily bad winegrowers. But with the crisis and the fact that we're drinking less and less wine, we have a lot of stock,” explains the winegrower.

Between cut prices, customs duties, and declining consumption, the Bordeaux wine industry is under pressure. Last year, producers mobilized against large-scale retailers. But this new tariff offensive is rekindling anger.

Wine at 1.89 euros a bottle: are we killing our winegrowers? - 05/09

For chef Yves Camdeborde, wine for less than €2 at Lidl is a disgrace. “I find it so sad. I thought that in France, we weren't allowed to sell at a loss? €1.89, if you take away the price of the bottle, the price of the cork, the price of the label, and the VAT, I wonder what they put in the bottle besides sock juice.” But as Thierry explained, cheap wine doesn't necessarily mean bad wine.

Yves Camdeborde continues: “It devalues a job while we are in the middle of the harvest, it is complicated to grow grapes in certain regions, it is the work of an artist and a passionate person. It is a tragedy to devalue the work of these people who kill themselves at the task. It is a shame, it should be banned”. The chef allows himself to give a piece of advice: “don’t drink it, you will get sick and it will cost you twice as much in the doctor’s office afterwards.”