Wine drinkers 'consuming less but better quality'
Accolade’s first Wine Report gathered data from 8,000 regular wine drinkers and uncovered insight into the needs and motivations when it came to buying wine.
The survey revealed volumes fell but value rose overall, influenced in part by rising prices and taxes but also by a shift among consumers towards choosing quality over quantity.
Premiumisation
Sparkling wine
The boom in sales of Prosecco drove a 23.3% growth in on-trade volumes of sparkling wine and an 11.7% decline in Champagne sales.
The renewed popularity of gin, up almost one fifth (19%) by volume in the on-trade, had a similar effect on spirit sales.
Information from Accolade Wines Wine Report
The report found that with wine consumption falling but spend increasing, the drivers for growth will bring in new consumers, creating new occasions and encouraging trade-up to premium brands, to drive penetration, frequency and spend respectively.
It claimed this needed a good understanding of the whole potential wine buying population and their needs in order to identify the incentives that will capture newcomers and derive greater value from existing wine drinkers.
Outside of wine, the drinks category overall, saw a drop in volumes (by 2.6%), but value increased by 0.8%. When split into wines, spirits and long alcoholic drinks, volume for wines fell by 5% and value by 0.5%.
Spirits volume also fell by 0.6% but value rose by 3.2%, while long alcoholic drinks volume dropped by 2.5% but value increased by 0.2%.
Wine volume
When it comes to volume share across the wine category, white dominates with 53.3%, followed by red with 31.5% share and rosé had 9.2%, in the on-trade.
Still wine holds the largest volume share at 87.4%, Champagne 2.4%, other sparkling wines at 9.5% and any other wine was 0.8%.
The report revealed young women drive entry into the wine market and continue to dominate as their interest grows.
