Laithwaites Wine Scraper

Scrape Laithwaites Wine — a leading UK wine retailer and wine club. Browse by category (colour, style, grape, region, or offer) with full pagination, or fetch specific products by URL/item code. Get price per bottle, vintage, grape, country/region, ABV, customer rating, review count, and stock status. No login, no cookies, no paid proxy required.

What this actor does

• Browse by category — 65 real categories (colour: red/white/rosé/ sparkling; style: light-juicy-reds, crisp-fresh-whites, etc.; grape: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Malbec, etc.; region: France, Italy, Bordeaux, Rioja, etc.; curated: 5-star-rated, award-winning, on-offer, bin ends) — with real server-side pagination (up to the category's full result count).
• Fetch specific products — supply product URLs or bare item codes to pull full details (tasting notes, accolades, allergens, dietary flags) for known wines.
• Filter results — price range, minimum rating, in-stock only, wine type, country of origin, keyword.
• Sort results (byCategory) — relevance, top rated, price low-to-high/ high-to-low, or name A-Z/Z-A, matching laithwaites.co.uk's own sort control.
• Empty fields are omitted — only fields Laithwaites actually publishes for a given wine are included; no null/placeholder values.

Output fields

Every record always includes itemCode, title, productUrl, sourceUrl, recordType, and scrapedAt. Other fields are included only when Laithwaites actually provides them for that wine (no null/placeholder values are ever emitted):

Modes

Browse by category (byCategory, default)

Laithwaites' own category pages support real pagination (24 results per page); the actor pages through automatically up to maxItems or the category's full result count, whichever is smaller, honouring the site's Crawl-delay: 5 from robots.txt between requests.

Set sortBy to reorder results the same way laithwaites.co.uk's own sort control does (relevance / ratingDesc / priceAsc / priceDesc / nameAsc / nameDesc). There's no reachable server-side sort endpoint, so a non-default sortBy makes the actor collect a larger candidate pool (up to 300 results) from the category's real pages first, then sorts locally before applying maxItems.

Fetch specific products (byProductUrls)

Supply full product URLs or bare item codes to pull complete detail (tasting notes, accolades, allergens, dietary flags) for known wines.

Filters

• priceMin / priceMax — GBP per-bottle price range (records without a price always pass).
• minRating — minimum average customer rating, 0-5 scale (records without a rating always pass).
• inStockOnly — only in-stock wines.
• wineType — Red / White / Rosé / Sparkling / Dessert / Fortified.
• country — case-insensitive substring match on country of origin.
• keyword — case-insensitive substring match against title, headline, grape, region, and appellation.

Input

Example: browse red wines under £15

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "red-wine",
  "priceMax": 15,
  "maxItems": 24
}

Example: top-rated Bordeaux, in stock only

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "bordeaux-wine",
  "sortBy": "ratingDesc",
  "inStockOnly": true
}

Example: fetch specific products by URL/item code

{
  "mode": "byProductUrls",
  "productUrls": ["https://www.laithwaites.co.uk/product/0022625", "0022625"]
}

Use cases

• Wine retailers/competitors — track Laithwaites' pricing and offers across categories
• Price comparison sites — build a dataset of per-bottle prices, vintages, and ratings
• Sommeliers/enthusiasts — filter wines by region, grape, and rating to build shortlists
• Gifting/e-commerce apps — pull product detail (tasting notes, ABV, allergens) for known wines
• Market research — monitor stock status and promotional offers over time

FAQs

Do I need to provide cookies, login, or a proxy? No. The actor works against Laithwaites' own public, server-rendered pages with zero-cost, proxy-free requests. A free Apify datacenter proxy is engaged automatically only as a fallback if repeated requests are temporarily blocked.

Why does opening a productUrl/sourceUrl with plain curl return a 403? Laithwaites' bot protection blocks generic off-platform requests while the identical URL loads normally in a real browser and in this actor's own Apify cloud runs. The URLs themselves are always genuine, live product pages; a 403 from a manual curl check off-platform is expected and does not indicate a broken link.

Is this affiliated with Laithwaites? No, this is a third-party actor built against laithwaites.co.uk's public pages; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Laithwaites.

Why do some records have fewer fields than others? Only fields Laithwaites actually publishes for a given wine are included — the actor never fabricates placeholder values. Fields like tasting notes, accolades, and allergens are only available from the product detail page (byProductUrls mode); category-listing records carry a lighter field set for speed.

Why might the price differ between category-listing and byProductUrls mode for the same wine? Category listings show the lowest available per-bottle price (which can include promotional case-mix pricing); the product detail page shows the standard single-bottle price. Both are real, current prices from Laithwaites — just different pricing tiers.

Does this actor respect robots.txt? Yes. Category browsing (/wine/<slug>) and product-detail (

/product/ <itemCode>

Limitations

• The category-listing API response also carries a handful of internal merchandising/engineering fields with no customer-facing meaning (e.g. an internal SKU family code, a numeric merchandise-line-type enum, and duplicate/rounded copies of fields already exposed more precisely elsewhere, like a plain integer star rating that duplicates the more precise averageRating) — these are intentionally not mapped to output fields since they carry no usable signal for a data consumer.