The French sparkling wine market, excluding Champagne, experienced a stable year in 2024, with a slight 0.7% decrease in retail sales volume but a 2% increase in value (based on Circana's 12-month figures as of January 5th). As reported by the trade magazine ‘Rayon Boissons,’ there are some clear winners within the category.
With over 2m additional bottles sold, Prosecco now exceeds 21m bottles.
Prosecco takes the lead, continuing its triumph in France from the previous year. With over 2m additional bottles sold (+10.4% compared to the previous year), it now exceeds 21m bottles. In terms of absolute sales figures, Prosecco is closing in on Champagne (26.6m bottles) in the French market, with a significant gap now separating it from Crémant d'Alsace, the country's best-selling Crémant at 17.9m bottles.
Among the Crémants, the Loire region's sparkling wine saw particularly strong growth in France, with an increase of 516,000 bottles, making it the second-strongest performer among all sparkling wines after Prosecco. The other top-performing sparkling wines include: Crémant d’Alsace (3rd place, +331,000 bottles), non-alcoholic sparkling wine (4th place, +322,000 bottles), Crémant de Bordeaux (5th place, +295,000 bottles), Charmat/tank method sparkling wines (6th place, +124,000 bottles), Crémant de Limoux (7th place, +64,000 bottles), other imported sparkling wines (8th place, +63,000 bottles), flavored sparkling wines (9th place, +42,000 bottles), and Montlouis (10th place, +33,000 bottles)
In an interview with the French daily newspaper ‘L'Union’ in early February, Édouard Castanet, director of the Fédération des Crémants, shared a surprising observation about Prosecco's triumph in France. With an average retail price of €7 in supermarkets, Prosecco is a direct competitor to Crémant. "One might have feared," Castanet noted, that Prosecco "would sweep everything away in its path, but that hasn't happened." Instead, Prosecco has "energized the overall consumption of sparkling wines," thanks in part to the "big wave of the Spritz," which has "familiarized people with the habit of sparkling wine as an aperitif." Indeed, Prosecco has attracted new consumers. SP
