If you’re planning to have a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the new year, chances are pretty good that the wine will be either white or pink; the amount of red sparkling wine in this world is so small you may never see one.
Sparkling white wines are a festive way to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Whether it’s a $6 bottle or an exalted French Champagne at 10 times that, the world loves to celebrate with anything containing bubbles.
Once 2024 is here, however, our wine consumption likely will remain with sparkling wine more than it has in the recent past. Consumers the world over, even if they’re not celebrating anything, seem smitten with anything that’s sparkling.
In a recent report, a major European wine agency (International Organization of Vine and Wine, OIV) says that the demand for white wines, “particularly in sparkling wine markets like the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom,” has increased in the last five years.
This has offset declining wine drinking in the last few years in Spain and France.
As a result of increased interest in sparkling wine around this country, a wine company in Healdsburg, California, Rack and Riddle, now specializes in producing high-caliber, sparkling wines for wineries that don’t have the proper equipment.
Because of significant demand by wineries nationally, Rack and Riddle recently opened another huge production facility.
That same OIV report also points out that white and rosé wines now constitute a greater overall share of the international wine market than do red wines—the first time that has happened in history.
Between 2017 and 2021, worldwide consumption of white wine increased by 42.2 percent and rosé wine sales increased 9.5 percent with the United States leading the world in consumption of white and pink.
One thing that may be driving part of the increase in white wine sales is that it’s much easier to produce lower-alcohol wines with character if it is a white wine. It’s more difficult to make decent lower-alcohol reds.
This category of low-alc wine is rapidly growing among those who desire less of an impact. At one point a decade ago, high-alcohol wines, particularly reds, constituted a significant increase in wine sales.
That has declined precipitously in the last three years and wine companies have responded by producing lower-alcohol whites, which also come with the added benefit of having fewer calories.
As for pink and rosé wines, sales of these products used to be significant only in the spring and summer months. Now, rosé sales are a year-round phenomenon.
Barry Herbst, wine buyer for the huge Bottle Barn store in Santa Rosa, California, for at least a decade has had enormous, floor-stacked and racked displays of pink wines from at least a dozen countries, including hard-to-get items from France and South Africa, and a massive selection from California.
