Italian sparkling wines

Exports of sparkling wine in 2007 were the main factor driving foreign trade of Italian wines. They grew from 300m to 387m, +29%, with an improvement in terms of both volume (+14%) and price mix (+15%). The post will also provide you details of the first 10 markets of Italian sparkling wines (where we immediately highlight the performance of Spain and Russia) and an analysis of the weight of some markets for the sparkling wine against the weight for bottled wines. The first graph shows the evolution of the value: the blue bars are all up and this means that exports grew in each month compared to the previous year, and the black line stops just a 387m: as you can see visually, growth accelerated in the final months of the year, which are those where exports are concentrated (40% in the last 3 months).The export volumes decreased slightly in December (-16% 110k/hl), bringing the total annual 1.207m/hl, against a level of 1.059m/hl of 2006 and touched a high in the 12 months to November 2007 1228k/hl. The critica market for volumes of sparkling wines is Germany, which suffered a decline in the month of December by 34% after two months with an increase of 10%. If viewed over the year volumes are up about 10% in Germany, even though during the year this growth was reaching 15%. The markets that keep growing volumes are three: the United Kingdom, Spain and Russia, which together cover about 200k/hl year, while the United States are gradually losing strength (+4%) and could go negative during 2008.The mix improved significantly. Enlargin the graph to the long term, we would understand that this is a recovery of a past, because 3.38EUR is not a high level. We have to warn you because these numbers are somewhat’ strange. The mix improved significantly in the last quarter thanks to Spain and the United Kingdom, which showed very high levels (such as to think of an anomaly in numbers).Finally we include detailed numbers for breakdown by nation. As you can see markets that are driving exports are the United Kingdom (doubling in the year), Spain at +132% and Russia at +67%. The United States are still performing well, given the tough exchange rate, while Japan is not performing well, with a 4% decline.The last chart provides you a comparison between sparkling and bottled wines. The % is the weight of the export market for that type of wine. The USA are much more important for still wines than for sparkling wines while Russia works out in the opposite way. The UK market seems more balanced from this point of view. As you can see, in the USA we export 27% of total Italian still wines exports but only 15% of sparkling wine exports.
(from http://inumeridelvino.it/2008/04/esportazioni-di-spumante-italiano-sommario-2007.html)