In this blog post, we wanted to share with you how we hand-select our wines, and why the selection not only means you get great wine for affordable prices, but also why you’ll rarely find these wines elsewhere in the UK.

This makes Plonk the ideal place for wine lovers who are bored of the generic bottles you get from big brand retailers and supermarkets.

For the vast majority of our wines, we import them directly from France, and here’s why:

Incredible organic and biodynamic wines

France produces a wealth of amazing organic and biodynamic wines that are still affordable. Wines with life and character but that are simultaneously clean and endlessly drinkable.

Margins & players

There can be multiple players in the chain of getting grapes from the vineyard, to a bottle in your hands.

If we bought everything from other established importers, they’d put their margin on it before we do, so you’re paying for two lots of businesses' margins.

Although it is more work for us - organising wine selections, transport from France, large warehousing and sitting on more stock - all of that results in a better deal for you, as there are less people taking a cut along the way.

This means you get way more bang for your buck. Take a £17 bottle from Plonk, and compare it to a wine of the same price from another retailer, and we reckon you could tell the difference!

Proximity

Importing from France means the wine doesn’t have to travel far. It’s the closest country, aside from the UK, from which we can bring in quality wines. This results in fewer transport costs, but more importantly fewer emissions.

Network of aggregators

France has a fantastic network of aggregators. These aggregators have established relationships with winemakers, helping us access a wide selection of wines.

When we select wines, we go through their lists, choose the wines that interest us, and then receive samples to taste in the UK. On occasion, if we have the time, we travel to France to meet the winemakers in person.

So we’ve covered the why, now let’s look at the how…

The selection process

We focus on selecting the best value wines, often from lesser-known regions, because we prefer to avoid the over-inflated prices that come with more reputable areas. The essence of Plonk is curating subscriptions to suit your tastes, delivering bottles that you may not have chosen yourself but that you’ll love.

Once we’ve chosen the wines we want to buy, we arrange for a pallet to be put together. It’s shipped to our warehouse, and from there, it’s packed into your wine subscription boxes.

As we said, operating this way is more time-intensive for a small business, but it allows us to cut out the middleman, bringing you more affordable wines.

That’s a little insight into what goes on behind the scenes at Plonk. If you’d like to know more about anything specific, just leave us a comment.

If you fancy trying the wine subscription yourself, just click here to take the quick and easy two minute quiz.