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We blind taste-tested every supermarket mulled wine – and found a clear winner

This £6 bottle impressed us the most

Sabrina Sahota

Deputy IndyBest Editor

Friday 14 November 2025 09:32 GMT

Here’s our verdict on some of this year’s supermarket mulled wines

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This year’s selection of supermarket Christmas food has all the classics we’ve come to enjoy, from mince pies to decadent desserts, and of course, mulled wine.

Once the Christmas food starts hitting the shelves, you can be sure to find pre-mixed bottles of mulled wine in every supermarket. With so much choice, it can be hard to know what to go for, but luckily, we’re here to help.

We’ve taken on the very tough job of blind taste-testing some of this year’s top supermarket mulled wines, including budget options from Lidl and Aldi to premium ranges at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. And there was a clear winner.

How we tested

With most supermarkets now stocking a pre-mixed mulled wine, we selected the bottles below to cover a range of different price points. We tested mulled wine from Aldi, Tesco, Lidl, M&S, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. Each bottle was taste-tested blind. Once each mulled wine was gently warmed, we rated them on taste, aroma and appearance.

Waitrose red mulled wine: £6, Waitrose.com

Waitrose’s red mulled wine scored the most points in our blind taste test. Our testers were impressed with its delicious festive aromas and well-balanced blend of cinnamon and clove.

The flavours are subtle, and it’s slightly on the sweet side, but if you want a full hit of Christmas in a cup, you can warm it on the stove with a dash of orange juice and infuse with some extra spices, like star anise. However, even on its own, in the words of IndyBest writer Lucy Smith, it’s “very drinkable, almost too drinkable”.

Drinks expert Emma Henderson was impressed with Waitrose’s offering too. “The spices are more rounded and balanced than in some others in the list. I liked that it's very orangey and it's slightly boozier than some of the others too,” she wrote in her review of this year’s best mulled wines.

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Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference mulled red wine: £6.25, Sainsburys.co.uk

It would be unfair not to mention Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference mulled red wine, which came in a close second. Our testers praised its full-bodied, complex base wine and warming blend of orange, cinnamon, cloves and vanilla. Some of our testers even said it was reminiscent of drinking mulled wine at a Christmas market.

“It might sound like a silly observation, but this mulled wine tasted the most like red wine out of all of the ones I tasted,” wrote Emma Henderson in her review of the best mulled wines.