Nearly 38% Agree This Grocery Store Has The Worst Wine Selection

With hard seltzer making waves summer after summer, it's easy to forget the affordable wine trend that began a few years previously. In 2018, CNN covered how big brand supermarkets and retailers had begun stocking their shelves with lower-priced wines that claimed to taste like more expensive bottles, a move inspired by the popularity of Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck." Now that this trend has become an established practice, we can evaluate which stores have offered a good alternative to the pricier wine store and, perhaps more importantly, which have not.

Mashed created a survey to see which grocery store had what people considered the worst wine selection. 646 Americans responded.

Of those responses, Trader Joe's was the least disliked. Only 7.89% of people thought their wine selection was the worst. This could be due to the cultishness Trader Joe's tends to inspire, or their reputation for delivering quality products at low prices. After them comes Whole Foods, with 8.98% of voters disliking their wine most. In third place is Target — the store received 17.18% of the survey's ire, meaning twice as many people found their wine selection unfavorable compared to the people who disliked TJ's or Whole Foods.

In second, we have a surprise. Aldi's wine selection has been deemed the worst by 28.02% of voters. Aldi, like Trader Joe's, has a devoted following, but clearly it's not because of their wine. However, when it comes to the grocery store brand with the number one worst wine selection, there is no competition.

According to Mashed's survey, the worst wine selection is found at Walmart. An impressive 37.98% of people disapprove of it. However, the reasoning behind this is harder to discern.

In trying to figure out the problem with Walmart wine, one runs into problems. The first is that whenever someone writes about Walmart wine, they usually frame the piece as "look, snobs, Walmart sells palatable wines." Articles in both Epicurious and Inc follow this model. The second is that people with strong opinions about wine never seem to feature Walmart in the discussion, except for one thread on ChefTalk where someone said a Horse's Creek sold by Walmart was the worst wine they'd ever consumed.

It is possible, then, that the dislike is due to a general antipathy towards the brand. In 2015, CBS reported that Walmart was the company Americans liked to buy groceries from the least. If Americans have a generally poor opinion of the company, it follows that they would dislike the wine selection as well. This remains true even as Grow wrote about Walmart's $5 wines potentially competing with Trader Joe's in 2020. As the data shows, Walmart cannot compete with Trader Joe's when it comes to customer devotion, wines included.