The white wine market - France

Wine is an alcoholic beverage obtained from the fermentation of grapes, the fruit of the vine. Wine can be red, white or rosé in France, and can be flat or sparkling. This particular study will focus on the white wine market in France, which is made from the alcoholic fermentation of grapes with uncolored pulp and white or black skins. Wine has a very strong cultural importance in France, as evidenced by the symbols associated with wine by the French: in a 2017 survey, 92% of French people associated wine with tradition, 91% with conviviality and 87% with sharing. It's also for this reason that people's friends and family influence their purchasing decisions in this sector, with recommendations from friends and family being the primary purchasing criterion for this market in France. Unsurprisingly, France is the world's second largest wine consumer (3.7 billion bottles consumed in 2019), behind the United States. France also ranks third among the world's largest wine producers by volume in 2021 (34.2 billion liters of wine produced), despite a particularly poor year due to bad weather and, in particular, the April frosts. White wine has historically been the third most consumed wine color in France, behind red and rosé. However, the trend is increasingly for red wine consumption to decline in favor of other colors. Indeed, while in 1990, 80% of wine drunk in France was red, by 2018 the reality was already quite different. If we look at the sales of PDO (nearly half the volume sold) and SIG (29% of sales by volume) wines over the year, we can see the importance of white wine on the national market. Over this period, 56% of AOP and 47% of SIG sales were red wine (by volume). According to France AgriMer, this has enabled white wine to capture new market share, accounting for 19% of PDO sales by volume (22% by value) and 25% of SIG sales by volume (27% by value).