Some time ago now, I bought some wine from Virgin Wines. It was cheap, and the quality middling – though their full money-back offer if you didn’t like the wine was (and still is, I believe) too good to miss. As a customer of theirs they send me their marketing offers via email every now and then, and unlike many other companies, they send me an email maybe once a month.

Other internet retailers – This is good. I don’t want to know about your MEGA SPECIAL OFFERS more often than this. Once a week is too often. Twice a week is where I look for the unsubscribe links, and any more often than that and I’ll be blackholing your mail outright.

However, recently I’ve noticed that they’re resorting to some pretty daft e-marketing ‘tricks’ with their offer emails. Like the one above, which arrived with the subject line of ‘SAVE £192.50… a bottle! Only 500 cases left”.

The email paints the picture that Virgin are selling bottles of wine that could go for £200 a time, at the princely sum of £7.50. An amazing deal, if it were true.

Sure, this wine is being produced by the same ‘vineyard’ as the £200 a bottle plonk, but to suggest it’s the same in terms of quality or craftmanship is ridiculous. It’s like a Skoda salesman telling you that their Fabia is of the same quality and from the core components as a Bugatti Veyron! Just because they’re owned by the same company (Volkswagen AG) doesn’t mean they’re the same car!

Whilst the Fabia is a good car (indeed, we own one!), and it shares some notable similarities with a Veyron (4 wheels, steering wheel, doors, windows, etc) it, plainly, isn’t the same thing – and the same is true of this wine.

I seem to recall that one of Virgin Wine’s other recent missives to me was equally ambitious in its claims – the email was setup to look like a genuine mistaken Forward of an internal mail, offering me ‘Chateauneuf du Pape’ wine for £5.99 a bottle. On further, careful, reading of the smaller print it is revealed that the ‘Chateauneuf du Pape’ being offered is in fact a ‘Vin de Pays’, a wholly different class of wine just one rung of the ladder above ‘Vin du Table’ – a lowly Table Wine. This is tantamount to bait-and-switch – I’m surprised they’re getting away with it.

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