Bag A Wine Bargain

One of the hardest things to get used to when you move to Shanghai as a wine lover from the West is the inflated prices of imported wines, with taxes and duties adding around 48 per cent to the original cost of each bottle. This being said, there are still bargains to be had, many of them by going online and letting your fingers do the shopping.

M1NT Cellars

Our first choice for online wine shopping is M1NT Cellars online shop (web: www.m1ntcellars.com). They run a range of promos every week that get mailed to our inboxes and tempt us to overindulge on the latest Sauvignon Blanc package deal they have going.

Full disclosure: We give in to this temptation about three out of every four weeks and now have a M1NT Cellars-induced wine glut in our apartment.

At the time of writing they had a buy-two-get-one deal on Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand for RMB 440. Delivery is free within Shanghai and an English-speaking representative will call to confirm your delivery time and address. It honestly couldn’t be easier.

Mealbay And Sherpa

You may know them as your go-to websites for yummy food delivered to your door on hung-over weekend mornings, but don’t overlook the wine deals on Mealbay (web: www.mealbay.net) and Sherpa (web: www.sherpa.com.cn). For the price of delivery (from RMB 15), you can get a surprising array of wines at a good price delivered to your door in only 45 minutes.

Both offer a range of promotions, as well as reasonable prices on non-promoted wines. At the moment, each is offering a six bottle mixed case of Chilean wine for your next party; Mealbay’s is priced from RMB 388 and Sherpa’s from RMB 455.

Cal-China Wine And The Wine Republic

For other online wine-related deals that pop up from time to time, it’s also a good idea to get your name on the following mailing lists: Cal-China Wine (email: [email protected]) for first dips on discounts for Californian wines; The Wine Republic (web: www.thewinerepublic.com), which currently stocks wine available to buy online from seven countries, both new and old world.

Finally…

Elder’s Fine Foods would also, until recently, have made this list, but they have newly announced that they will be selling their products through Field’s online supermarket (Web: http://www.fieldschina.com) and shutting their own online shop, so it might be worth heading over to Fields and checking out the potential deals on Australian wine there.