The range launched with around 40 of its most popular and top pick wines, which are available as cases of six or 12-bottles. There is a particular focus on 6-bottle cases and mixed cases in order to drive trial, a spokesman said, adding that it was likely to add incremental customers rather than cannibalise its own website.

Virgin Wines CEO Jay Wright said it had seemed like “an obvious step” to develop its relationship with Amazon, who it has worked with for more than eight years, originally offering discount vouchers to Amazon customers to drive recruitment to its own website and more latterly with the new sendagift.com service that launched before Christmas.

“How and where people buy wine is constantly evolving, so making our wines available through a small number of carefully selected retailers seems an obvious step,” Wright said. “This gives us another opportunity to interact with wine enthusiasts and introduce them to the great wines we have to offer.”

Wright noted the success of the Virgin’s tie-in with Amazon over its sendagift.com service, which accounted for around 12.5% of the gift service’s total sales.

These encouraging results gave us the confidence to expand our product range on Amazon into our core ‘by the case’ business,” he said.

The wine specialist is hoping to sell around 20,000 cases through the online retail giant next year.

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