Chains Uncork Wine Packages for the Holiday Season

With a clever nod to Clement C. Moore—and presumably, an eye on discount competitor Aldi—Albertsons Cos. is kicking off the countdown to the holiday season by introducing a wine advent calendar.

The calendar—including 24 187-milliliter bottles of wine from premier U.S. wine growing regions—is packaged in a holiday-decorated box with perforations intended to release one bottle at a time for 24 days in the style of an advent calendar.

The boxes will be available for a limited time and in limited quantities at Albertsons’ U.S. banners this holiday season.

The practice of offering limited-edition holiday gifts like wine in a box—a high-ticket item suitable for gifting and highlighting points of differentiation in private brands—has been popularized in recent years by the discounter Aldi, which found phenomenal success behind an offering featuring its private label wines it first made available in the U.S. in 2018. That retailer has subsequently expanded the offer to other categories like cheeses as consumer demand exploded, with stores often selling out of their stock within a day. This year, Batavia, Ill.-based Aldi is offering 20 different advent calendars.

The practice in the meantime has been adopted by numerous other retailers including this year Kroger, Albertsons and Southeastern Grocers, the Jacksonville, Fla.-based operator of the Winn-Dixie chain.

Boise, Idaho-based Albertsons for its part has crafted a clever campaign around the launch, with a dedicated website providing information like background and pairings of the different wines. It announced the project this week in a rhyming press release styled after Moore’s 19th century poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” better known by its opening line “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Albertsons’ version, which you can read in its entirety here, sets the story in the “months before Christmas” in pandemic-infected 2020, where “the grown-ups were pent-up for far, far too long/And wanted to end 2020 with a proper swan song.”

Albertsons enlists the help of elves to enliven spirits:

“Let’s give them a calendar to count down the days

Fill the dates not with meetings; rather, give them chardonnay,

And cab, and pinot, the best from western lands,”

Suggested Chad Coester, SVP of Own Brands.”

An Albertsons spokesman told WGB the wine packages are expected in all stores where Albertsons banners sell wine by Oct. 10 and will retail for around $59.99.

Kroger similarly is tapping into updated holiday tradition with a 24-bottle advent calendar it dubs the “Oh What Fun!” collection. The offering will be available in participating stores Nov. 1.

Southeastern said its offering was available now in select Winn-Dixie and Bi-Lo stores in Southern states, retailing for .99. It too details available wines and pairings on a dedicated website.

Photograph courtesy of Southeastern Grocers