Six Naked Wines Tasted

My local wine club recently had a tasting supplied by Naked Wines. Despite the company having been around for 15 years it was my first tasting of their wines. In part that was my ‘fault’, because a lot of what I read about the operation didn’t appeal to me.

Naked Wines makes a huge play of their ‘Angels’ programme. Customers become Angels by depositing a regular sum of money into their account. Naked Wines uses this money to subsidise winemakers to make wines. These are then offered back to the ‘Angels’ at prices said to be well below market value. The pitch is: you get a better deal than you can elsewhere, and we’re all helping support winemakers.

It sounds good in theory, but whenever I looked at their wine offering I thought the non-Angel prices seemed excessively high. Indeed, the wines tasted here didn’t seem like especially good value to me, even at their ‘Angel’ prices.

Naked Wines’ apparent altruism also doesn’t quite square with their recently departed CEO’s basic annual salary of £350,000 – with bonusus potentially reaching £570,000 (source: The Standard newspaper).

£570,000 is not the sort of salary traditional wine retail would recognise, but then, Naked Wines is not traditional wine retail; it’s a dot.com start-up, where big risks and potentially big returns for investors are the norm. Unfortunately, like so many of those, the story has not all been rosy: its current share price values the business at a little over £20 million, a far cry from its £600 million valuation in 2021. In March 2024 a debt advisory company was appointed (source:The Drinks Business).

Does it Work?

Despite it’s financial worries there is no doubt Naked Wines is a slickly-delivered and novel idea. It appears to be operating successfully if their quoted 330,000 UK-based ‘Angels’ is an accurate figure. Indeed, I have encountered many people who are perfectly happy to be ‘Angels’. They enjoy the wines and believe that both they and the winemakers are getting a good deal. So Naked Wines is doing something right.

Naked Wines says its model gives winemakers “the freedom to make wines the way they want to.” That’s probably my final problem with their pitch: with a claimed 790,000 Angels across its UK, Australian and the US operations, is it really possible to support small scale, individual winemakers as they claim? Passionate winemakers are not led by the market, but by their own uncompromising vision. It’s hard to believe that being funded to make wine specifically for your investors encourages that.

The Wines

The wines tasted here were fairly good, but I was not convinced that they offer genuinely good value. Perhaps the scale of the company mitigates against them carrying through their promise to “make spectacular wines exclusively for you, at insider prices.”