Majestic Wine: Tesco joins the auction, Sky News reports
Fortress Investment Group is selling the UK wine retailer it bought for £95m in 2019. Tesco is reportedly among the bidders, but nobody has confirmed it.
Tesco is among the bidders for Majestic Wine, according to Sky News, as owner Fortress Investment Group runs a sale of the British retailer. None of the companies involved has confirmed it.
The report appeared on 5 October 2026. Sky News says Tesco is understood to be one of several parties in an auction for Majestic Wine Group, and the Morning Advertiser, The Grocer and Retail Gazette carried it the same day. Tesco, Majestic and Fortress all declined to comment, so everything below about Tesco's interest is press reporting, not established fact.
Fortress bought Majestic for £95m in 2019, when the business was separated from Naked Wines, which is listed in London. According to The Grocer, it hired Rothschild earlier this year to look at options, and a formal sale process began a few weeks ago. The identities of the other bidders have not emerged.
Until a bid is confirmed, the only safe verb in this story is reported.
What Majestic Wine is worth to Tesco
The Grocer talks of around 200 shops, while other trade coverage puts the figure at more than 200 across the UK and Jersey, with over 1,000 employees. Under Fortress the chain added more than 20 stores. Sales were £386m in the year to 31 March 2025, flat on the year before, while profit fell by almost half to £7.7m, The Grocer reports.
The group is no longer just a shop chain. The Morning Advertiser lists four divisions: retail, Majestic Commercial, which supplies the on-trade, the distributor Enotria&Coe and the wine bar operator Vagabond. Majestic bought Vagabond out of administration in April 2024, with nine venues and more than 170 jobs, and acquired Enotria&Coe in 2025. That sits in a London bar scene that keeps filling up: Yield opened a third natural wine bar in Angel only recently.
That mix is what makes Tesco plausible. It bought Booker for £3.7bn in 2018, and Booker acquired Venus Wine & Spirits in June 2024. One analyst quoted by The Grocer suggests a deal could run through Booker, given Majestic's business-to-business supply arm.
A sale with no confirmed price
No valuation has been published. The Grocer expects a deal that would return hundreds of millions of pounds to Fortress, a figure that rests on reading recent trading, not on any disclosed bid. The Morning Advertiser notes that the structure and value of any transaction remain unclear, and no agreement has been reported.
For the record: confirmed are the 2019 purchase price and the 2025 trading figures. Reported but unconfirmed are Tesco's participation, the Rothschild mandate and the size of the eventual price. Companies in a process like this rarely say anything until a deal is signed, so silence tells you little.
The test will be whether Majestic is sold whole or in parts. A retailer with flat sales and halved profit is an easier sale if its on-trade divisions can be priced on their own.
