Report: Champagne highs and lows in 2025

By Oliver Catchpole

Published: 08 December, 2025

Wine Lister, the end-to-end strategic consultancy for wine businesses, has released its 2025 Champagne Report: In Victory and Defeat.

According to the report, the champagne market is adapting in response to the ‘complex’ economic climate (which is impacting all fine wine categories).

In these conditions, the region has recorded a -12% decrease in average price over the last three years. However, its level of consumer recognition, and what the report called its “omnipresent distribution” have protected it to some degree – for comparison, Burgundy saw a -29% decline in price and Bordeaux fell by -13%.

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Champagne’s prominence can also be seen in the report’s analysis of Google search volume for each region over the same three years. Champagne totalled over triple the number of average searches of runner up Bordeaux, although its search volume only grew by +1% since August 2022, in comparison to Bordeaux’s +7% (or Burgundy’s +53%).

With growth in consumer engagement flagging behind other French regions, the report also found that trade confidence in Champagne had dropped by an average of -5.8% since its previous report in 2018.

According to Wine Lister, these drops in confidence are driven by specialist and top tier merchants/importers, while the confidence of auction houses actually increased by +21.4%.

Grower champagnes have gained some momentum, receiving the highest confidence scores overall. However, family-owned maisons saw confidence fall the least (-1.6%). Meanwhile, confidence in Grandes Marques – which already had the lowest confidence scores overall – fell on average by -10%.

Looking at average performance, the report found that family-owned and grower champagne houses come out on top of Grandes Marques in quality and market presence.

Overall, the family-owned houses pulled ahead when it came to quality, with an average critics score of 94.2/100, compared to 93.8 and 93.4 for growers and Grandes Marques respectively.

They were also the most listed globally, which Wine Lister suggested shows a mismatch between trade popularity and consumer demand, as family-owned maisons lagged behind other producer types, with a 12-month average market price and number of searches of £215 and 96,000, respectively.

In contrast, Grandes Marques are ahead in both price and popularity, with 12-month averages of £233 and 235,000 respectively, while growers had averages of £224 and 178,000.

Looking closer at individual champagnes and estates, the report found that Canard-Duchêne Brut Vintage had the highest quality-to-price ratio (QPR). Notably, this was one of only two vintage cuvées that made the top 10 for QPR, with the metric skewed towards non-vintage wines.

Grower champagnes were absent from the list, with Wine Lister suggesting that established houses are better able to provide competitive pricing for quality wines.

The full report is available here.

Image credit: Guido Reimann on Pixabay

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