A continued slump in Champagne sales has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In April, the Comité Champagne (CIVC) released the complete 2019 sales figures and for the second year in a row, the figures were quietly put up on the website without much fanfare.

A few months earlier (February 11, to be precise), we found out that, for the first time since 2009, the total amounts of bottles sold dropped under 300 million, even if the turnover broke another record: €5 billion for 297.6 million bottles sold. Compared with 2018, the total volume decreased by 1.6 percent (down from 301.9 million bottles), while the value of the Champagne market increased by 2 percent (up from €4.b).

The driving factors for the loss of volume can mainly be attributed to the shrinking French market (down 4 percent), which with 141.6m bottles remains the largest Champagne market both in volume and value – 47.6 percent of the total volume and 39.6 percent of the total value.

The boost in revenue was predominantly due to the increase of prestige cuvée export sales, up by 15.3 percent in volume and 18.1 percent in value. With 8.6m bottles out of a total of 156m bottles exported, the prestige cuvée category is almost 6 percent of the export volume. In contrast, the non-vintage category lost market share for the third year in a row – 0.8 percent in volume and 1.5 percent in value compared to 2018.