Erratum: a previous version incorrectly had the maximum sales at 237.8 million bottles. It should have been 337.8 million. The article has been updated to reflect the. correct number.

As sales continue to dwindle for the third year in a row, with no respite in sight, alarm bells have started to ring in the appellation. Earlier this year, Maxime Toubart, president of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons (SGV) and co-president of the Comité Champagne (CIVC) first raised potential questions around the wine’s desirability. A brave move if it were really explored, but unfortunately, he only just scratched the surface. He encouraged growers to embrace alternative champagne consumption habits, for instance by promoting champagne as a cocktail ingredient or exploring the option of making lower alcohol cuvees, as sure-to-work solutions to reclaim champagne’s lost market share. In his own words: “it does not really matter how people choose to consume champagne; as long as we sell the bottles.”

However, by shifting the focus on potentially novel champagne consumption methods, Toubart fails to address the elephant in the room: e.g. why champagne has been incapable to grow on par with the sparkling wine market, which according to the recently released OIV Global Wine Trade focus report on wine re-exports, nearly quadrupled (from 3mhl to 11mhl) in the last 25 years. Today, at 269.4 million bottles (the MAT at the end of September), champagne sales are eerily close to the volume sold in 2002 (267.7), showing a 17.2% volume decline in the last three years, when post-Covid market adjustments pushed Champagne closer to its all-time 2007 record of 337.8 million bottles.

Still, when flattening out the sales during the Covid and post-Covid period, the data shows a steady decline since 2008, that accelerated with the increased growth of the general sparkling wine market.

Toubart is not alone in avoiding the million-dollar question, it seems very few (if any) in Champagne are willing to analyze the data in detail to draw the substantiated conclusion that structural change is needed. It is not easy to envisage a complete overhaul, but it is not because a system has worked in the past that it will continue to work in the future, especially when key conditions have changed.

For instance, Bordeaux has long been considered the godfather region of wine, yet today it has become near impossible to sell Bordeaux at every level. It seems, as Neil Martin argued earlier this year, that people have just moved on.