A Bottle of Wine Costs ₪19 in Paris and Up to ₪70 in Israel. We Checked What the Exact Same Barcode Costs at Every Chain That Sells It
By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-08-23 · 5 min read
50% — The gap Superclear found between the cheapest and priciest Israeli branches selling the identical 750ml bottle of La Vieille Ferme — and the split tracks Superclear's own chain-priciness ranking almost exactly (our Aug 23, 2026 data)
A bottle of La Vieille Ferme — the everyday French table wine French students buy for a house party — leaves its winery in southern France at a price equivalent to about ₪10.4. In Paris, on the shelf, it costs roughly 5.5 euros, about ₪19. On an Israeli shelf, the very same bottle can run all the way up to ₪70 — a 270% jump from the Paris price, according to a Calcalist investigation published August 20, 2026 that mapped, shekel by shekel, everything that happens to the bottle in between. We pulled the same barcode from Superclear's own price data to see whether Israeli shelves actually back that number up.
Nineteen shekels in Paris, up to seventy shekels here
La Vieille Ferme, made by the Perrin family (also behind Château de Beaucastel), is deliberately positioned as an accessible, no-frills wine — the kind sold by the case in French supermarkets. Calcalist's reporting found that by the time an equivalent bottle reaches an Israeli shelf, it has been repositioned, in practice, as something closer to a specialty item, sold in wine boutiques as well as supermarkets at several times its French retail price.
Every stop the bottle makes on the way here
Calcalist's breakdown starts from the winery's roughly ₪10.4 exit price and adds, stage by stage: land transport in France (₪0.99), sea freight to Israel (₪2.17), insurance (₪0.20), the refrigerated containers required to survive an Israeli summer (₪1.20), local logistics and licensing (₪2.77), and mandatory Hebrew labeling (₪1.38). Then comes the item importer Uri Kaftouri singled out as the real distortion: Israel's customs duty on wine combines a 12% rate with a minimum charge of about ₪1.41 per bottle, which on a cheap bottle like this one works out to roughly ₪3.9 — about 38% of the original winery price. "On cheap wines, the minimum customs duty doubles the initial exit price," Kaftouri told Calcalist. From there, a distributor markup of 35% plus ₪11.68 brings the bottle to about ₪33.5, and a retail markup of 30% plus ₪14.3 brings it to roughly ₪56.4 before VAT — landing, in practice, in the ₪50-70 range Calcalist observed on real shelves. Winery owner Gilad Palm put the core objection bluntly: "How many other consumer products do you know where the taxation reaches a rate like this?" Importer Kobi Shaked added that shipping costs alone have risen sharply over the past three years, on top of the fixed duty.
What we found on the actual shelf
Superclear tracks two barcodes from this same product line: the 750ml white (item code 3296180000047) and a second 750ml bottle from the same range (3296180000016). As of our August 23, 2026 data, the white bottle is stocked at 69 stores across seven chains — City Market, City Market Kiryat Gat, Salach Dabach, Keshet Teamim, Politzer, Stop Market and Super Yuda — at prices from ₪49.90 to ₪64.90. The second bottle, carried at 66 stores across six of those same chains, ranges from ₪49.90 to ₪74.90 — topping out slightly above the high end of Calcalist's ₪50-70 estimate. Both figures land inside, or right at the edge of, the range the investigation calculated from the import math alone, before any of the chains' own commercial decisions are added on top. Worth flagging honestly: none of Israel's three largest chains — Shufersal, Rami Levy or Carrefour — carry either barcode in our data, so this specific comparison is confined to Israel's mid-size grocery chains, not the full market.
The gap tracks our own chain rankings almost exactly
The spread between chains isn't random. Super Yuda, which Superclear's chain-priciness index ranks 3rd most expensive of 33 chains nationwide (15% above the median), charges a flat ₪59.90 for both bottles. City Market Kiryat Gat, ranked 6th (7% above median), sells them for ₪54.90-₪69.90. City Market, ranked 9th (5% above median), shows the widest internal spread of any chain in our data on this product — ₪49.90 to ₪74.90 across its own branches. On the other end, the chains our index ranks "very cheap" — Salach Dabach (30th, 14% below median), Politzer (27th, 12% below median) and Keshet Teamim (25th, 11% below median) — all cluster tightly around ₪49.90-₪54.90, with almost no spread among themselves. Stop Market, ranked "cheap" (21st, 7% below median), sells it at a flat ₪50. On this one imported wine, a chain's general position on Superclear's year-round index predicts its price almost bottle for bottle.
The bigger picture
This isn't a one-off. A March 2026 Institute for Retail Research survey ahead of Passover found gaps of up to 53% on identical wine bottles across nine Israeli chains, with a 78-shekel spread on a full holiday wine basket between the cheapest and priciest chain. And none of this happens against a backdrop of heavy local demand: Israelis drink roughly six liters of wine a year per capita, among the lowest rates in the developed world, against roughly 46 liters in France and about 51 in Portugal, per a Ministry of Agriculture analysis cited by Maariv.
What Calcalist's breakdown makes clear is that the markup on a bottle like this one isn't the work of any single villain — it's freight costs, a flat-rate customs minimum that hits cheap wine hardest, a distributor's cut and a retailer's cut, stacked one on top of the other, each one calculated on a base that already includes the last one. Nothing here is illegal or hidden; it is, in fact, published, checkable data — which is exactly why it was worth checking. If you're picking up a bottle of imported table wine this week, our data says the more useful question isn't "why is this so expensive," but "which of the seven chains that carry it am I standing in" — because on this bottle, that alone is worth up to ₪25.