Prosecco has become the best-selling sparkling wine in the world, and experts say that it is eroding the market share of Champagne. The Italian wine’s production eclipsed Champagne’s five years ago and is now 75% higher at 544 million bottles.Champagne still claims the revenue crown on the basis of last year’s record sales of 4.9 billion euros (Rs 39,000 crore). But Proseco’s popularity is on the rise. Exports of this year are 16% more than that of last year’s 804 million-euros (Rs 6400 crore).Adding insult to injury, sales are surging 40% in Champagne’s home country, France, according to one estimate. And those figures don’t reflect the seasonal Christmas sales bump of 20%. Michael Edwards, an expert who has been a wine judge for Decanter magazine and wrote the book ‘The Finest Wines of Champagne,’ says consumers are increasingly interested in sparkling wines.“Prosecco capitalizes on the desire to drink sparkling wine, not necessarily Champagne,” he says.
The credit for the success of Prosecco is attributed to its low price and its profile, which has become popular in Great Britain, United States and Germany, in a market where champagne flourished for a long time. Jowin Lepper Carberry, a consultant for a medical devices company in Baltimore, Maryland, tried Prosecco at the beach four years ago, and liked it so much she started making frozen smoothies with it for friends at her pool. She moved on to making cocktails for dinner parties and has used Prosecco instead of Champagne for the past four New Year’s Eves.“My initial reason for trying it at the beach is because it was less expensive than Champagne. Now I use it because I prefer it to Champagne,” she said.
The lower price is in part made possible by a simpler production method. It has two processes of fermentation, both in large tanks, whereas Champagne’s second fermentation period is done while the wine is bottled. That requires storing the Champagne bottles at an angle and turning them slightly every day by hand to help the fermentation — expensive manual labor when done over thousands of bottles.Prosecco producers themselves are taken aback by their wine’s success, and mindful not to squander it. They are up against not only imitators, but also other sparkling wines, like Spain’s Cava, which still does not rival Prosecco in terms of global sales, and Germany’s Sekt, which experts say has improved in quality.Prosecco’s growing popularity, and the proliferation of sparkling wines in general fueled by younger drinkers, is forcing Champagne makers to up their game.