The Sommly Blog
Dispatches from the UK wine scene.
Sky News reported on Saturday 3 October that Tesco is one of the bidders in an auction for Majestic Wine. Nobody involved is talking. Tesco, Majestic and its owner, Fortress Investment Group, all declined to comment, and Sky could not say who the other bidders are.
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Nick Rudge opened The Jackdaw above an old cinema on Conwy's High Street in 2021, trained for seven years at The Fat Duck, and has spent five years building a wine list that just beat every other restaurant in Wales to a national award.
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Britain's second-biggest wine brand just decided that "Shiraz" and "South Eastern Australia" are not how most people choose wine. And honestly? They might be right.
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72% of respondents to a 2024 government consultation backed this. That number stuck with me when I read through the detail of what actually changed on September 15, 2026.
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Sparkling wine's duty-free allowance is doubling. From October 1, 2026, the limit goes from nine litres to 18 litres, and the reason is a category change that's been a long time coming.
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The Savoy is turning its Beaufort Bar into a wine bar in October, with 250 wines and half of them by the glass. Good news if you can't afford the bottles.
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The number doing the rounds this week is fifty percent. That is roughly how much of Champagne's normal output will not exist this year, according to reporting from Xinhua and NovaNews on September 7. Not a bad year. Not a tricky vintage. Half gone.
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The grapes at Tommasi's estate outside Verona were already coming off the vine last week. That's mid-August. For a region that has historically picked in late September, that kind of shift doesn't happen quietly.
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The Drinks Business calls Champagne's 2026 harvest the healthiest since the mid-1970s. Here is what that means for the bottles you will actually buy.
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Forty-six and a half percent. That's not a rounding error or a bumper quarter. That's Argentine bulk wine shipments to the UK growing by nearly half, in a single year, according to Vinetur's figures from August 2026.
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Grapes are coming off the vine in August. Not late August in a warm year, the kind you'd shrug at. August, full stop, in regions that historically picked in October.
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Tannat is not a grape most London wine drinkers have strong feelings about. That's sort of the point.
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