Total Champagne shipments in 2023 account for 299 million bottles, down 8.2 per cent from the previous year. After three extraordinary years, Champagne is back to pre-Covid shipment levels.
With 297.3 million bottles in 2019, sales had fallen the following year by 18 during the pandemic, and then bounced back by 33 per cent in the following two years to reach over 325 million bottles by the end of 2022.
In 2023, France is down by 8.2 per cent with 127 million bottles. The domestic market has suffered more from inflation, compared to export markets, which has weighed on household budgets throughout the year.
Exports are down 8.2 per cent from 2022, with 172 million bottles, but are well above their 2019 level (156 million bottles) and now account for more than 57 per cent of total sales, compared to 45 per cent ten years ago. The overstocking by distributors, for fear of shortages in 2022, partly explains the decline between 2022 and 2023 results.
Despite the drop in volume, the increase in value for cuvées, especially within the export markets, has enabled the appellation to maintain its sales above 6 billion euros.
Maxime Toubart, president of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons and co-president of the Comité Champagne, "welcomes this return to market stability. Champagne is a protected appellation produced within a delimited area and governed by strict rules that make it impossible to sustain strong growth in volume over the long term".
For David Chatillon, president of the Union des Maisons de Champagne and co-president of the Comité Champagne, "the decline was to be expected - but with the value maintained, Champagne is still optimistic for the future, whilst remaining sensitive to the geopolitical context and the state of the global economy".
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