Fewer tabs, better bottles.

I started The Vine-Letter because I kept missing good offers.

The merchants worth buying from each run their own reductions, on their own timetables. Keeping an eye on all of them meant a dozen open tabs and a good deal of luck, and even when a bottle was marked down, there was no easy way to tell whether the “was” price meant anything.

So we built something to do the watching. Every week we record the price of each bottle at the merchants we follow. When a price falls, we can see it against what that bottle has actually been selling for, rather than taking a “was” price on trust. The best of those reductions go into the letter on Thursday morning, with a link straight to the merchant.

The rules we keep

• No commission. Merchants don’t pay to appear, and picks are chosen on value alone.
• We say what a saving is measured against: our own price records where we have them, and the merchant’s own price, clearly labelled, where we don’t yet.
• Single bottles only. No cases, mixed packs or magnums, so a price is always the price of one bottle.
• No repeats. The same offer from the same merchant won’t appear two weeks running.

Beyond the letter

The same price records power Wine Watcher, which emails you when a wine you love is reduced at any merchant we track, and My Cellar, which keeps a record of the bottles you own and what they’re worth at today’s prices. There are editions for the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa, each following merchants in its own country.

If you have a question, or a merchant you think we should be following, write to hello@thevineletter.co.uk. I’d be glad to hear from you.