Heathrow to get second fine wine store

Travel retail fine wine specialist Wine Collection: Rare & Vintage is opening a second London Heathrow store in November.

The inaugural store in Heathrow Terminal 5 has performed so well in its first year the operator, World Duty Free, is adding a second outlet in Heathrow Terminal 3 in November.

Aside from buoyant Champagne sales, the store’s best-selling wines are from the better-known regions and brands like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Chablis and Cloudy Bay, with a high proportion of sales from the £10 to £20 bracket.

Total travel retail wines sales are posting a 2.3% increase in volumes, although wine is being outpaced by the growth in spirits, forcing the former’s share of alcoholic drinks in travel retail to slip from 34% of sales to just under 30%.

Explaining why this may have happened, Erik Juul-Mortensen, president of the Tax-Free World Association (TFWA) told the drinks business that wine could be losing out in terms of retail space in airports because the margins aren’t as good as they are on spirits, while he added: “Fine wines should be growing beautifully, but perhaps producers are not as geared to the market as spirits.”

For more on travel retail see the upcoming September edition of the drinks business.