This is who drinks the priciest champagne

Since Champagne exports have been in the news recently, I thought that we might look at which countries preferentially drink the stuff. We are sometimes told about the top Champagne export markets, in terms of total value. For example, the AAWE recently listed these countries as the top markets for 2020:

United States (501.9 million euros), United Kingdom (338.2 m€), Japan (270.8 m€), Germany (167.4 m€), and Italy (146.8 m€).

But this does not really tell us much, because the USA has 5 times as many people as the UK, and 2.5 times as many as Japan, so we expect greater imports of most things. So, this does not tell us much about the relative propensity for drinking Champagne, among these countries' denizens. What we need to do is look at how much the people are spending, individually. We do this by working out the price being paid per person, not per country.

My data for the population size of these countries comes from Worldometer. I simply divided the AAWE numbers by the Worldometer numbers. This leads to the country rankings shown in the graph. Each point represents one of the top 30 Champagne-importing countries, ranked horizontally by total value (million euros) and vertically as value per capita (euros per person).

The correlation between these two rankings is not high (0.25), indicating that the price per person is very high in some places, even if the total volume imported is small.

For example, note that the #1 importer (the USA) drops to 20th place per person, while Luxembourg jumps from 29th for total volume to 1st per person. Indeed, Luxembourgers spend 10 times as much on Champagne as those cheap Americans; and the Belgians and Swiss do not do too badly for themselves, either. The full list of per capita expenditure is included at the bottom of this post.

Note that other large importing countries also move down the rankings after accounting for population size, such as China. On the other hand, some smaller countries move up the list, notably Sweden, Denmark and Norway — those Scandinavians certainly do themselves well for sparkling wine.

Some countries hardly change ranking, of course, including Australia, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. Interestingly, the people of Hong Kong spend nearly twice as much per person on Champagne as do the Singaporeans. There might be a message there, although I am not sure what.

We could, of course, compare this per-capita Champagne list to the AAWE list of overall per-capita expenditure on wine. The latter list places most of the same countries at the top of the ranking, including Switzerland, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, and the United Kingdom. However, Luxembourg is nowhere to be seen, and instead we have Slovenia. So, the Luxembourgers must specialize in Champagne, while the Slovenians apparently prefer some other sparkling wine, instead. Perhaps the Luxembourgers celebrate more often than do the rest of us? Perhaps there is something wrong with the local Crémant de Luxembourg?

Anyway, recent reports note that: Booming Champagne could reach pre-Covid levels by year-end, along with: Sparkling, pricier wines lead in retail sales. Unlike the rest of the wine industry, things seem to be looking reasonably good for the sparkling-wine makers in eastern France, even if those Champenois are annoyed with the Russians, just at the moment, and the organic farmers are having trouble with downy mildew.

Per capita expenditure on Champagne in 2020:

Country Luxembourg Belgium Switzerland Hong Kong Sweden Denmark United Kingdom Australia Norway Singapore Netherlands Austria Finland New Zealand Italy Japan Germany Ireland United Arab Emirates United States Canada Spain Portugal South Korea Taiwan South Africa Russia Mexico Nigeria China

€ / person 14.70 12.20 10.87 6.13 5.32 5.10 4.96 4.89 3.64 3.32 2.94 2.84 2.60 2.52 2.43 2.15 1.99 1.93 1.85 1.51 1.38 1.28 0.88 0.57 0.55 0.26 0.24 0.12 0.06 0.03