Global bulk wine exports decline 11.8% year on year

By Hamish Graham

Published: 17 September, 2026

Data from the World Bulk Wine Exhibition (WBWE) can reveal that the bulk wine category has faced continued declines in exports over the past year – falling 11.8% in value for the 12 months following April 2025.

This figure now stands at €2.33bn. A similar drop was seen for value exports which have dipped by 10.3% to 30 million hls for the same 12-month period. Average prices saw a slight fall to €78 per hl.

Bulk sales are also declining at a faster rate than the overall global wine market – the export figures for the wider industry dropping 6.6% and 8.8% in volume and value respectively over the 12 months following April 2025.

Read more: Delaunay Vine & Domaines achieves B Corp certification

The sale of bulk wine has been in decline over the past 10 years. For the period 2017 to 2026, volume exports have fallen 19.3%, while value exports have dropped 11.7%. The market has not premiumised as much as the bottled wine (non-sparkling) market – although export volumes have dropped a similar proportion (19.8%), value exports have only dipped 2.5% over this 9 year period for this market segment.

The bulk category has remained approximately a third of global wine volume exports with the overall value lowering from 8.5% of wine export value in 2017, now standing at 7.1%.

The firm majority of producing nations have seen volume and value export reductions for wine in bulk. Spain remains the largest bulk producer by a substantial margin – over double the volume production for the 12 months to March 2026 compared to the second ranked nation (Australia).

Spain has bucked the trend for this period, however, seeing a slight rise in value exports of 0.9% (though volumes fell 5.2%). This was in part due to the northern hemisphere’s smaller harvest boosting revenues slightly. By comparison value exports for the next most valuable bulk producing markets – New Zealand, Italy and Australia – fell by 20.6%, 11.3% and 15.4% respectively.

UK leads imports

The UK is the largest importer of bulked wine in terms of value (€126m for Q1 2026) and second ranked for volume (1 million hls in Q1 2026), the former having dropped 9.7% year on year, and the latter 3.7%.

Contrasting with the wider market, it is Australian bulk wine, not Spanish that is imported at the greatest volumes to the UK – 130.6 million hls for the 12 months to March 2026. This Aussie figure has dropped 17.8% for the period. Interestingly New Zealand wine volumes for this year time frame have risen by 17.8%, now ranking third in the UK import rankings (57.4 million hls).

Chile ranks second (60.1 million hls) in terms of UK bulk imports while South Africa (54 million hls) and the US (47 million hls) rounds out the top five.

The analysis from WBWE was conducted by Del Rey Analysts of Wine Markets (AWM) and authored by Rafael del Rey.

The World Bulk Wine Exhibition takes place on 30 November and 1 December 2026 in Amsterdam, where Harpers will be in attendance.

Printer friendly version