Aldi Chipping Norton
If you're stocking up for the week (or just topping up the wine rack), Aldi on the edge of Chippy is the place. It's quick, it's cheap, and the wine selection punches well above its price point.
If you're stocking up for the week (or just topping up the wine rack), Aldi on the edge of Chippy is the place. It's quick, it's cheap, and the wine selection punches well above its price point.
There's no pretending Aldi is a charming Cotswold farm shop. It sits in a retail park on the Banbury Road, it has strip lighting, and nobody is going to offer you a tasting of anything. But that's not why you go. You go because the basics are genuinely good, the prices are startlingly low, and the wine aisle regularly turns up bottles that cost twice as much elsewhere. We've had some real finds: crisp Albari'os, decent Malbecs, and the odd award-winning gin that appears for a fortnight and then vanishes.
Then there's the middle aisle, the so-called Specialbuys section, which is its own kind of theatre. One week it's paddleboards, the next it's log burner accessories or a stand mixer for forty pounds. You will almost certainly leave with something you didn't intend to buy. The store is about ten minutes from the cottage by car, and it's worth combining a trip with a wander around Chipping Norton itself, picking up anything Aldi doesn't cover at the independent shops along the high street.
“Aldi for the wine and the weekly shop, then the Chippy deli for the things that make it feel like a holiday. Between the two, you're sorted.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.