Poppin’ off
French Champagne makers will be raising a glass to customers in the US, the biggest global market for the sparkling wine by value and volume, who spent $998m on the drink last year.
All told, the number of Champagne bottles shipped worldwide rose 1.5% year-over-year, fighting off competition from other sparkling wines like Prosecco and Cava, resulting in a record $6.6 billion in sales according to the Comité Champagne, a joint trade association for the industry.
Still fizzy
Besides counting bottles and collecting data, one of the Comité’s primary focuses is to battle against mislabeling around the beloved beverage. Those in the industry are quick to remind people that Champagne can only be labeled if it's actually from the Champagne region, an important distinction relating to the provenance and processes behind the drink, that Comité lawyers look to uphold around the world.
It’s only bottles that come from this region, ~85,000 acres of vines around 30 miles east of Paris, that are included in the 33.7 million figure shipped to the US last year — the second highest year on record, and up some 31% on 2019 shipments.
The only country where more Champagne is drunk than the US is France itself, where domestic sales reached 138.4 million in 2022. That shakes out to 2 bottles per person per year, nearly 20x the per capita consumption in the US.
