Virgin wines UK

[Gus]

I've got a £20 off voucher for Virgin wines if i spend more than £50 on a case with 12 or more bottles. If anyone out there has used this service and has any recommendations, I'd love to hear them. Most of the wine on the site, I've never heard of. It's http://www.virginwines.com

[britcook]

I've been using them for a while and in general they deliver pretty much what they promise. I am particularly taken with the Escalonia Tempranillo 2000, the Marie-Louise Parisot Bourgogne (red) and the Cave de Lugny Bourgogne Blanc. The only real disappointments have been the 'Three Gables' range which seem a little less than described. With £20 off a case plus a free 13th bottle (of their choice) it is hard to go wrong.

[Gavin Convery]

Echo the comments on the Three Gables - unfortunately I took 2 cases for the price of 1 thinking it was a bargain too far, but the wines lack any real character so I'm slogging my way through them slowly.

Other than that the service is good and efficient but you can't beat a proper merchant in the end.

[endless autumn]

The wines look extremely boring to me.

I also dislike the way you cannot search for what you want, merely follow their suggestions.

Malcolm Gluck's site advertised the £20 off offer for a while which was amusing since the only two wines from there he used to list both scored around 12 points.

£20 = at most four bottles of bad wine: just invite four friends round to dinner and for the same amount spent you will have one fun evening plus four bad bottles of wine.

[Gus]

You see I was a bit befuddled by the wines. None of them grabbed me somehow. Maybe that's because they've arranged chavster-style, but it was also because I'd never heard of any of them. I wondered if the company was simply using marketing hype followed by customer loyalty to sell not-very-good wine.

Also, I dug out an old newspaper review, which gave wines there huge praise a year or two ago, when the service just started. I decided to pick those wines, but none of them were there.

Google searches also established that they sold De Torens Fusion V, which I'd always wanted to try. They don't do that now.

What I can't see are safe choices that would make the discount attractive. And I don't have the confidence that I do when ordering from the wine society - the wines they choose have always seemed good to me.

So I'm wondering whether to even exercise my money-off voucher now...

[britcook]

It's a case of "Do You Feel Lucky?". The advantage of ordering from a web supplier like Virgin is that you can often get a bargain or interesting wine that is not available anywhere else but the downside is that you have no idea of what the wine is like until you open it. I have had no bad wines from them, just the occasional one that lacked a little whatever, but was still drinkable and reasonably priced.