Tesco Joins the Bidding for Majestic Wine
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.
That is close to everything known for certain, and it is not much. There is no price, no agreed deal, and no guarantee Tesco ends up with it. But Britain's largest supermarket chain owning a wine specialist with more than 200 shops is an odd enough idea to be worth ten minutes.
What Is Actually for Sale
Fortress, an American private equity firm, bought Majestic for £95m in 2019 and split it from Naked Wines in the process. Earlier this year it hired bankers at Rothschild & Co to look at selling, and the formal sale process started several weeks ago, according to Sky. Analysts quoted in that report expect a sale to bring in hundreds of millions of pounds.
The business being sold is a good deal bigger than the one Fortress bought. Majestic has more than 200 stores across the UK and Jersey and over 1,000 staff, having opened more than 20 new shops since 2019. In April 2024 it bought the Vagabond wine bar chain out of administration (nine venues at the time, and it has kept opening them, Brighton in August being the latest the Morning Advertiser mentions). Then in March 2025 it agreed to buy Enotria & Coe, a distributor founded in 1972 whose customers include Gaucho, Rick Stein and Hotel du Vin, saying it wanted to become the country's "pre-eminent supplier to the on-trade". On-trade is the industry's word for restaurants, bars, pubs and hotels. Anywhere you drink the wine where you bought it.
The money is less rosy. Sales for the year to the end of March 2025 were £386m, about the same as the year before, and profit almost halved to £7.7m by The Grocer's count (Business Matters has it at £7.8m). Sky's report does add that Majestic has since had its best Christmas on record, serving nearly 11% more customers than the one before.
Why Tesco Might Want It
My first reaction was "Tesco already sells an awful lot of wine, what does it want 200 more shops for?" I suspect the shops are not the main attraction.
An analyst told Sky that Tesco could do the deal through Booker, the wholesaler it bought for £3.7bn in 2018. That was Tesco's last acquisition on anything like this scale, and Booker has been buying in this direction already. In June 2024 it took over Venus Wine & Spirit Merchants, which supplies more than 3,000 wines, beers, spirits and soft drinks to hospitality businesses. Put Enotria and Majestic's own commercial arm next to that and the logic is easy to follow, whatever you think of it.
That is one analyst's reading, mind. Tesco has not said a word.
What It Would Mean for the Shops
I don't know, and neither does anybody else who hasn't seen the bids.
The part I would watch is the part that makes Majestic different from a supermarket aisle. John Colley, Majestic's chief executive, has called its "experiential stores and expert colleagues" a "central part of our strategic plan". People who can talk you through a shelf cost money, and a business making under £8m on £386m of sales does not have much to spare. A new owner could decide the expertise is the reason to buy Majestic and pay for more of it. It could just as easily decide the opposite. Private equity owners sell in the end, so somebody was always going to face that choice, and Tesco is only the name that got everyone's attention.
None of this touches the independent wine bars, bottle shops and educators whose tastings Sommly lists. If the news has you wondering where you would buy wine from somebody who can tell you about it, an evening at a local independent's tasting is a cheap way to find out.
As for the auction, there are other bidders and we don't know who they are. Ask me again when somebody puts out a statement.
Sommly lists Majestic's wine clubs and earns a commission if you join one through our links. Majestic had no say in this post.