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

Several storms in a teacup, perhaps?

Over the past fortnight, a number of apparently controversial issues have arisen in the wine industry. However, it seems to me that in several cases the combatants are talking at cross purposes; and the media are not helping the situation. So, I will discuss three of them here.

Bordeaux

Let's start with the kerfuffle in Saint Emilion, in which two of the Grand Cru Classé A estates (Château Cheval-Blanc and Château Ausone) are withdrawing from the upcoming (2022) revised classification process: Bordeaux giants quit the classification system.

These estates have officially objected to the criteria being used for the revision, claiming that "the areas for evaluation went too far beyond what we considered fundamental". Naturally, they have also claimed that: "It is not that we feel that we are above the classification at all, or that we don't need it".

My immediate response, along with some other people, is: "I wasn't born yesterday". Let us have a look at the listed criteria that the two estates list as important, along with a list of those to be used for the re-classification. We can align them this way, with the estate criteria on the left and the new criteria on the right:

the terroir the wine the history

terroir analysis   tastings (of the last 10-15 vintages)      sales   visitor experience   press coverage   social media presence

When looked at like this, it is pretty obvious, isn't it? The criterion that the estates insist is missing from the new criteria is their exalted history, whereas the evaluation by the Institut National de l'Origine et de la Qualité will include what is happening today, instead.

Now, okay, the wine industry is well-known for resistance to high-tech. Many wine producers only take reservations by phone, for example, and some don’t use social media at all.

However, these two estates seem to be living in the wrong century; and they will have to face up to it eventually. There is, of course, also the more basic question of whether we even need classifications of wine estates, in the first place.

Croatia versus Prosecco

The Italian DOC and DOCG wine region of Prosecco seems to like litigation. A while ago, they lost a very long-standing argument with the Australians, who insisted that the name “Prosecco” has always referred to a grape variety, as well as to a geographical region. The Italians tried to insist that the grape should be called “Glera”, leaving the “Prosecco” name untainted as a Geographical Indication. They lost, although the Australians did agree to call their Glera-based wines “Australian Prosecco”, just to be clear.

The Italians are now after the Croatians, again, who are much nearer to them, being just across the water: Prosecco wars: Italy protests Croatia’s bid for special status for its prošek wine.

The Croatians have submitted yet another application for special European Union recognition of their dessert wine, called “prošek”. In response, the Italian members of the European Parliament have protested to the European Commission. Their argument is this:

When Croatians say “prošek”, they mean a centuries-old sweet, dessert wine made near the Adriatic coast from the grapes that have been dried in the sun in order to concentrate the sugar in their juice. When Italians say “prosecco”, they mean the sparkling wine, produced exclusively in northern Italy, made from the glera grape variety, often blended with other white wine varieties.

Clearly, the two words do sound alike; and this obviously arises from geographical proximity. Italian is a Romance language, while Croatian is a Slavic language (technically, South Slavic), and thus the two words do not descend from a single ancestral word. This is an example of what we call evolutionary convergence.

Given that the two wines under discussion have little in common stylistically, it is only the similarity of name that is being disputed. What are the Italians trying to claim: that their customers cannot tell a sweet Croatian wine from a bubbly Italian one? Perhaps Prosecco's customers cannot tell any of these apart, either:

• Proseč (a town in the Pardubice region of Czechia)
• Prosec (a prescription medicine that is used for the short-term treatment of duodenal ulcers)
• any one of the Procedural Security companies that exist worldwide, who use the same Prosec abbreviation.

We need to get serious here. The stealing of words for commercial purposes is one thing, to be deplored; but historical convergence of words due to geographical proximity is another thing altogether. We are going to have centuries of litigation if we start deploring the latter. Sadly, the betting seems to be that the Croatians will lose, anyway.

Shampanskoye vs. Champagne

This is being treated as the biggest scandal of the past fortnight. The Russian government has deemed it time to start regulating what can be written in Russian on the back label of a bottle of sparkling wine, in Russia: Russia's storm in a champagne flute. This should surprise no-one.

However, the wine industry in Europe, in particular, has reacted in what seems to be a rather extreme manner:

• Sorry, Putin. Your absurd new law can’t stop Champagne from being Champagne
• Vladimir Putin’s ‘champanskoïé’ coup described as the “most significant usurpation of a wine appellation in history”
• France backs champagne producers after name change in Russia
• Champagne Drappier fears Russian law is just the tip of the iceberg
• EU expected to launch WTO case against Russian Champagne labelling decision

In amongst all of this media hype, there has been at least one word of common sense:

• Is Russia really banning French winemakers from using the term ‘Champagne’?

The latter article points out that the new Russian law applies only to the Cyrillic script on the back label of the bottles, not what is written in Latin script on the front label. This means that the front label of imported sparkling wines does not have to change, and can say “Champagne”, “Prosecco” or “Cava”, as the case may be. The back label, however, cannot say any of these equivalents:

Шампанское (Shampanskoye or Champanskoïé)
Просекко
Кава вино

but must instead say:

Игристое вино (Sparkling wine)

This makes it difficult to see what the fuss is about. Perhaps it comes from people who are not used to having two languages on their wine labels? Oddly, these people seem to be blaming Vladimir Putin personally for this situation, rather than discussing broader governmental motives. More interestingly, it has been pointed out that the situation regarding Champagne and Switzerland is really rather similar.

Mind you, the Comité Champagne Interprofessional Champagne (CIVC) is also willing to object to other products that actually do contain champagne. For example, the recent resolution concerning the Aldi Champagne Sorbet, which contains 12% champagne wine, was in favor of the objectors (the CIVC), who claimed that use of their unique wine did not give the sorbet any fundamental characteristics (Aldi’s champagne sorbet goes sour).

On the other hand, the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV) has now adopted Russian as its sixth official language, which “will enable the Russian-speaking community to better understand and appropriate the international standards and practices that the OIV has adopted to improve the conditions of production and marketing of vine and wine products.” Thus sounds eminently sensible; and it involves no litigation at all.

Conclusion

Perhaps the current pandemic has had more affects on the wine industry than people have realized. All of this “social distancing” might have been taken metaphorically as well as literally, and people are now making trouble out of boredom. If so, then the sooner you all get vaccinated (so far, USA: 48%; Sweden 57%), then the sooner you can take your masks off, and start being social to each other again. Do not make an official storm in every teacup you can see.

Do online wine ratings and searches actually mean anything?

Social media sites like Vivino, Delectable and Cellar-Tracker collate wine ratings from their users, and Wine-Searcher does the same thing for critics, as well looking at the search popularity of wines. These sites sometimes present a compilation of their data as representing things like "the best wine in the world" (eg. Is this the best wine in the world? An app with 35 million subscribers says so) or "the world's most desired wines" (eg. The world's most wanted wines).

This seems like quite a radical conceptual leap, to me. It is one thing to note what wine is, in some sense, the most popular wine, on average, for the restricted set of users represented on any given online site. It is another thing altogether to present this as "the best" in any broader sense. To leap from a restricted user base to the entire world is a form of arrogance, at best, and complete and utter foolishness at worst.

After all, a highly rated wine (in the most general sense) may have little to do with "the best" for anyone other than the people doing the rating. First of all, ratings may have nothing to do with quality, but only with a desire to rate, based on any criteria you wish to name (eg. Should critics rate wine based on environmental impact?) — a rating is more like a popularity contest, rather than a quality evaluation. Second, the raters themselves are rarely representative of any group other than people who wish to provide ratings — they may have any motive at all for doing so. Third, the products being rated are rarely representative of the range of products available — they tend, for instance, to be associated with their snob value rather than their value for money.

So, does the highest average wine-rating on a site like Vivino represent the quality of the wines being rated, or does it represent their snob value? Vivino regularly tells us it is the former, while I suspect it is more likely to be the latter. Does the number of wine-label searches carried out on a site like Wine-Searcher represent the desirability of the wines being searched for, or does it represent their curiosity value? Once again, Wine-Searcher regularly tells us it is the former, while I suspect it is more likely to be the latter.

What use, then, is the information provided by these types of sites? Sure, they are a valuable outlet for the modern penchant for social-media opinions, just like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in their respective domains. Given their extensive usage, I presume that these sorts of sites are providing a useful service for Millennials and Generation-Xers — my parents' generation nattered over the back fence or down at the pub, by my children's generation natters online. So, I doubt that we can take these services as anything other than opinions; and certainly not as a source of quantitative information about the actual goods and services, which are hiding firmly in the background. A Twitter storm, for example, has little to do with the topic at hand, but much more to do with human behavior when acting in groups — we learn much more about the people than we do about the topic.

These kinds of observations are a basic tenet of the social sciences. Getting reliable quantitative information out of human beings takes a lot of effort; and it is a topic that has been actively studied for more than a century, without any explicit resolution (see Best practices for survey research). Formally conducted surveys can be useful, although they have their own set of limitations, notably to do with what is known as sampling bias. Social media might seem like a quick and easy way to get at the same type of information; but I doubt that this works. It is more likely "quick and dirty", with the emphasis on the latter; because the "survey" respondents are self-selected (ie. they choose to use the site, and they choose to provide a rating) — this is known to be the worst form of sampling bias.

So, do not allow yourselves to be gulled by pronouncements from online social media sites. They have no more real information about the world than you do — they know only about the opinions of their own users, whoever they may be, and whatever motives they might have.

On a personal note, rarely are the wines commonly mentioned by most of the social-media sites of any relevance to me, in practice. Wine is not for bragging about, but for consuming with dinner (the benefits of which are explained here). As such, value for money is the main information of interest to me prior to a purchase. I will try any wine from anywhere, if there is evidence of it being good value for the money being asked. Most of the wines being bragged about and searched for online are therefore of no practical interest at all. It seems to be a pity that they get most of the attention, while "my type of wine" requires more effort to locate (see Calculating value for money wines). In this sense, the so-called "social media" is often anything but social (and, yes, I am quite well aware that a blog is a form of social media!).

The value of wine exports

I have written before about the relationship between the volume of wine exports and the monetary value of those exports, with regard to particular countries. Clearly, some exports are worth a lot more money, per liter, than are others. I thought that it might be worth looking at the current top export countries, to see how these differences come about.

The first lot of data to be discussed come from the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (via VinEx), for the year 2020. The graph below shows us both the volume (horizontally) and the value (vertically) of the wine exports for the top 11 wine-exporting countries, with each point representing one country.

Clearly, there are three (named) countries that stand out from the rest, plus another two (Chile and Australia) that produce more than the main bunch (which includes, in decreasing order of volume: Argentina, United States, South Africa, Germany, Portugal, New Zealand).

In order to understand the way in which the top three export countries differ from each other, I have added a dashed line that summarizes the relationship between volume and value for the other eight countries (those at the left of the graph). This line reveals that 63% of the variation in value (among countries) is related solely to export volume. It is thus the other 37% that is of interest — why do the countries vary?

Of especial interest to us in this post, Spain is below this line, indicating that its Euro / Liter price is less than the average for the other countries. Italy, on the other hand, is above the line, indicating a better-than-average export price for its wine. France is way above the line, indicating that it is doing much better than any other country — it is getting much more money per liter than the others.

To look at why France might be different, we could look at some data from the Fédération des Exportateurs de Vins & Spiritueux de France (also via VinEx). These data break down the French 2020 export volume and value by type of wine quality. The following table shows the Euros / HectoLiter values for five French categories:

Champagne Still wines AOC Still wines IGP Varietal without GI Other wines without GI

2,347 773 223 216 138

As expected, the values are different for the different wine-quality categories, with the upper Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) wines being worth, on average, 3.5 times as much as the more basic Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP) wines. However, the real sting is that the Champagne wines are worth 3 times as much as the other AOC wines, on average. This is why France stands out so strongly in the graph above — not for still wines but for its prestige sparkling wines (whose premium value is based very much on customer perception).

So, French wine export value relies heavily on the sparkling wines of Champagne (not Coteaux Champenois!). Some data from the Comité Champagne, via the AAWE, for the main Champagne markets in 2020 show the following destinations, in millions of bottles:

France United Kingdom United States Japan Germany Belgium Australia Italy Switzerland China

113.3 21.3 20.8 10.8 10.1 9.0 8.5 6.9 4.9 3.5

Interestingly, another set of Comité Champagne data, also via the AAWE, shows that the percentage of Champagne exported has increased steadily since 2010 (from 42% to 53%), while the amount shipped within France has steadily fallen over that time (from 185.1 million bottles to 141.6 in 2019 and 113.3 in 2020). So, clearly the French wine exporters know which side their bread is buttered on.

We can compare this situation to that of the Italian wine exports. Some data from the Bulk Wine Club (via VinEx), break down the Italian wine exports for the first half of 2020. This next table shows the Euros / HectoLiter values for four categories of Italian wine exports:

Sparkling Bottled Bag-in-box   Bulk

348 351   205 72

As you can see, Italian sparkling wine does not do better than the still wines, in terms of value. The Italians are doing well in terms of value (as shown in the top graph); but they now know what they need to do to move further upwards — improve their sparkling wine’s image.

The Spaniards are in a somewhat different position, of course. It is well known that they are the world’s biggest bulk-wine exporters (Global bulk wine routes visualized); and the financial consequences of this have been discussed by several people before now (eg. Spain is world’s biggest wine exporter but why does it sell its vino so cheap?).

Spain does export more wine per capita than their competitors (2018: Spain 45.0 liters per person, Italy 32.7, France 25.1). However, this is not enough, and the Spanish sparkling-wine producers know it. High-quality Cava does exist (The search for high-quality Cava begins in Penedès); and there have recently been moves to improve the quality and image of Cava (Cava’s last shot at survival).

However, wine is not actually a particularly big part of Spain’s exports. In terms of value, automobiles are number 1, with automobile parts/accessories not far behind. Spain is a big producer of pharmaceuticals, and also of processed petroleum oils (import crude oil → export refined petroleum). Even swine meat, citrus fruit (fresh and dried), and olive oil out-export wine. Indeed, in Spain the vineyard share of the national agricultural crop area is less than Italy’s (2017: Spain 5.5% , Italy 7.6%, France 4.1%).

So, there are various inter-connected reasons for the differences in export value among the top wine-exporting nations. It would be boring if the world were too simple.