Sparkling wine delivered bumper Christmas sales

By James Lawrence

Published: 06 January, 2022

The sparkling wine category was the clear winner of the Christmas retail bonanza, with both merchants and analysts reporting bumper sales.

According to Kantar, sales of private label sparkling brands grew by 22% in the multiples during the four weeks to 26 December.

"Majestic saw a record Christmas period as we continued to outperform the market. It came very late, due to the Covid-19 communications, but in the last week we were up against the market by 55% (according to Nielsen) and recorded some of our biggest ever days, even throughout lockdowns,” said a representative from Majestic.

“Sales of Champagne and sparkling wine rose by 12% and 24% respectively in the Christmas period, when benchmarked against December 2020.”

Independents also reported phenomenal sales, far exceeding their pre-pandemic turnover, and up on 2021.

“Christmas was buoyant at The Wine Society with another year of growth with sales 5% higher than 2020 and 28% higher than 2019 before the impact of the pandemic,” said director of wine Pierre Mansour.

“The big story of 2021 was the performance of sparkling wine, in particular Champagne which was tracking at about double the rate of 2020 (people were definitely planning on celebrating this Christmas). Own label also performed well – our flagship wines under The Society’s Exhibition range were extremely popular, selling around 20% more than the previous year. It is further evidence that our members traded up for Christmas.”

According to the IWSR, “consumption of all sparkling wine in the UK, led by Prosecco, will climb from 14.4m 9L cases in 2017 to 16.2m by 2022. A comparison of growth per head over 10 years from 2012 shows consumption growing from 1.8 litres to 2.8 litres by 2022.”

A report issued by the analyst firm added: “English sparkling wine is forecast to add 100,000 cases to the market in the period to 2022. Imports of prosecco will rise to 11.7m cases by 2022, stealing share from Champagne, Cava and all still wine. However, the rate at which prosecco continues to steal share from Champagne over the forecast period will lessen as the former category approaches its peak point.”

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