Would I pay £25 for a glass of Veuve Clicquot? Not if I could help it, no. Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t drink Veuve Clicquot if it cost £5 a glass. The only circumstance in which I can imagine drinking it is if it’s free at a work function with no fire escape.
Yet, there I was at Maison Assouline in London, waiting for a friend, shamefully ordering a glass of the stuff and paying a Madrid day’s worth of childcare for it. It was simultaneously too early for a Negroni, which is what I really wanted, and too late for tea, so I was told. The £18 French Bloom was out of the question, and the more expensive wine list wasn’t any more inspiring, so Veuve Clicquot it was. I could have stood up and left, sure, and tried to find a better place in nearby Soho, but the leather sofas were so plush and I was wearing heels and carrying half my life in a battered Longchamp bag and needed to chill and look effortlessly put together before seeing my friend. So, you see, I had no other choice. (On my way out I sneered at the sight of their £1,150 The Impossible Collection of Wine book opened to the page of the 1928 Krug.)
Living in Madrid might have whittled away my already thin patience for what has come to be known as affordable luxury, which is business-speak for plonk at inflated prices. I am not arguing that it’s effortless to make or sell affordable luxury; the heavy lifting is done by the geniuses in LVMH’s and others’ marketing departments. What I am saying is that it’s neither affordable nor, really, a luxury. It seems that affordable luxury is ever present in large cities without truly “affordable” alternatives. It’s a different story in Madrid, which has plenty of restaurants with Sherry and Rioja on tap for £3 a copa, and even bottles such as a Louis Roederer for £54. In London, Louis Roederer sells for that price in a supermarket and at two, three and sometimes four times that in a restaurant.
Before I get carried away in a rant against bright orange wine labels and other affordable luxury vagaries, the point I’ve been trying to make is that you can’t make luxury at scale; once you do, it stops being a luxury.
Let me explain.
We have been told, and perhaps intuitively believe, that a higher price signals higher quality. Trying to define “affordable luxury” is not easy, because luxury goods do not naturally conform to the idea of being “affordable”. The two words are, when put together, an oxymoron.
The rise of the middle class meant that, as Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske argued in their 2003 book, Trading Up: The Transforming Power of New Luxury, consumers were willing to pay premiums of 20% to 200% for certain kinds of well-designed, well-engineered, and well-crafted goods, from gourmet coffees to Mercedes cars.
But two things have happened since.
First, the middle class is not rising anymore. It’s shrinking; and in the US, it has been shrinking for 50 years (in 1971, 61% of Americans lived in middle-class households, but by 2023 the share had fallen to 51%, reports the Pew Research Center), and a similar trend is very clear in the UK too, although the data from the OECD’s Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class is from 2019, though still relevant today. Economists call this the K-shaped economy, meaning rich people are becoming richer and poor people are becoming poorer, and the middle class, once the cornerstone of economic development, has been hollowed out. I believe this development to be crucial to wine, and especially crucial to the current downturn in the wine market.
Wine, in its broadest sense as a drink on the table, is considered, along with coffee, chocolate, and others, an affordable indulgence. Its price has traditionally been reasonable enough to accompany a meal without giving it too much thought. With a shrinking middle class and increasing prices, this type of good has been in less demand, simply because fewer people can afford it.
In the same document, the Pew Research Center reports that the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has fallen almost without fail in each decade since 1970. This means that the purchasing power of the middle class has decreased, not only because its share of the population has declined, but also because middle-class incomes have not risen quickly enough to keep pace with those of the upper-income class.
Why isn’t wine sold to the upper-income class then? Well, perhaps because the upper-income class doesn’t want anything other than the very best of fine wine, which they can afford without too much concern about price, that’s why, but the market for these wines is much smaller than the broader market for wine.
The second thing that happened has been a more recent development, brought to the world by the pandemic and the easy money that came with it. A 2025 McKinsey report, The State of Luxury, highlights that in the years between 2019 and 2023, the luxury market experienced “unprecedented growth”, but goes on to say that only 20% of it was due to volume expansion, while 80% came from increases in prices. That’s to say: demand didn’t expand as quickly as prices did. In that frenzy, some companies failed to adapt their creative strategies and supply chains to meet new scale requirements, thereby ultimately “failing to keep their promise to the clients.”
Some marketing geniuses worked out that price no longer needs to bear any relationship to quality and, in some twisted way, price itself has become the product, the simulacrum. in other words, you buy the thing — whatever it is — not in spite of the price, but because of it. Quality is no longer part of the equation, and craftsmanship has become a story told about the thing, rather than something embedded in it. Some people may say, then, that when one buys one thing or another, they are simply buying the logo stuck on the front of it. True, but arguably one buys the logo because it is supposedly connected to quality, craftsmanship and scarcity — the very attributes that should be attached to luxury itself.
And that is what companies failed to uphold: the luxury promise of uncompromising product and experience quality. In fact, according to the latest BCG + Altagamma research, Luxury Is Back on Track, With Healthier Foundations, which surveyed more than 10,000 luxury consumers, 70% of consumers said they had walked away from a purchase because they considered the price unjustified. The cat is out of the bag: affordable luxury customers know that an increase in price does not necessarily equal an increase in quality anymore.
I am not saying that affordable luxury is plonk, as I may have suggested before for dramatic effect, or that there is something wrong with it. In the case of wine, such brands are generally well made; some wine critics might even describe them as “consistent”, “interesting”, “a good, middle-of-the-road effort”, or whatever, and give them 90 points. But the real question is — are they worth the price premium when it comes to quality? Are we sure that the orange label of the aforementioned Champagne is really worth twice the price of some unknown Grand Cru Champagne? What does that additional outlay buy me as a consumer? I am not one of these people who claims that wine should cost only this much because it is everyone’s God-given right to afford it. What I am questioning is the affordable luxury price tag on a like-for-like basis, which, of course, has to be that high to pay for the marketing and sales.
If you think that 20 million bottles of that aforementioned Champagne label are made each year, you might understand why ubiquity is essential to affordable luxury, and marketing too. More on this point: an essential part of LVMH’s acquisition strategy for wine brands is the potential for volume expansion. Take Château d’Esclans, for example: the acquisition allowed LVMH to scale Whispering Angel’s production from about 100,000 bottles to around 5 million.
Of course, scalability is a huge part of making affordable luxury. The whole point is to take something that has (supposedly) the attributes of luxury and make it available to a much larger number of people. That means producing it at scale and distributing it widely enough that it is essentially everywhere. Ubiquity is therefore not a side effect of affordable luxury but part of the business model. Yet again, it is in great contrast with the ‘exclusivity’ and ‘difficult to get’ pillars of luxury itself.
The ubiquitous nature of this kind of distribution means working with lots of négociants, distributors and merchants, and this kind of open relationship is very good in growing markets and awful in contracting ones.
If a company partners with multiple négociants that work in the same market, say the UK, in a growing market, all the stock is sold and everybody is happy. When the market is struggling to shift this or that wine, however, and a merchant buys the wine and must absolutely sell it on because of cash-flow issues, they would be justified in marking down the price of the stock (which is theirs and that they have acquired), only to soon receive a threatening email from the château or the négociant. This kind of behaviour is rife in the wine market (I’ve been contacted multiple times by people who have received such baseless threats), and it has a name: price fixing (or at least attempted price fixing, in the case of wine). In fashion, on the other hand, Gucci, Chloé and Loewe have been fined a total of €157 million by the European Union’s antitrust watchdog for fixing the resale prices of their retail partners.
The other side effect of this ubiquitous strategy is, of course, that these kinds of wines are everywhere. Literally everywhere. And while in a growing market they would be somewhat drowned out by lots of other offers, in a shrinking market, where restaurants, bars and hotels look to reduce the size of their stock, number of partners and riskier choices, it’s fair to say that they appear more frequently than usual, and in some instances, the customer doesn’t really have a viable alternative.
It’s this kind of ubiquity that makes the wine feel less special. I would also argue that makes wine feel a bit dull, a bit boring, a bit stuck-up. In my view, affordable luxury wines are the most anti-wine thing. They diminish one of the biggest pleasures of wine — discovery — and dull the need, on the part of both consumers and places, to propose and consume different things — precisely what makes modern wine so exciting.
As a wine lover first and foremost, I know there are plenty of fantastic wines at affordable prices (which you can find plenty of on this publication). Then why aren’t these great wines in your average wine shop, your average restaurant and your average bar?
Where are these great, affordable wines?
Perhaps the real cost of affordable luxury is not simply that we pay more for what is increasingly average and familiar, but that a handful of brands take up so much space that there is less room for everything else. And when there is less to discover, wine becomes a little less interesting.
Photo by Mohamed Masaau on Unsplash