At £5 a bottle, Woollies launches Britain's cheapest champagne

It is the high street retailer best known for its Pic'n'mix range of sweets and its bargain basement toys, homeware and children's clothing.

But next week Woolworths makes an unlikely foray into the luxury end of a competitive and discriminating market. It will launch an own-brand champagne with a selling point that Taittinger and Veuve Clicquot will find hard to match: at £5, Woollies says that it will be the cheapest champagne in Britain.

The drink, part of the retailer's growing Worthit! value range, goes on sale on Monday in its 15 bigger out-of-town stores which are already licensed to sell alcohol.



Thousands of bottles are being stocked, but the company expects the product to disappear so quickly when it goes on sale that it will initially restrict sales to one bottle per customer. Woolworths' bubbly will significantly undercut the cheapest champagne, currently being sold by Asda and Tesco, whose own-label versions both cost £10.74.

The company said its product was "real champagne" manufactured by a relatively small producer, Henry Villios, who is based in Epernay, in the Champagne-Ardenne region, and supplied by Park Lane Champagne in East Grinstead, East Sussex.

But champagne experts said it was impossible to produce a decent bottle of the drink at that price.