The Chris Shanahan wine archive: Value and profit in sparkling wine

Selling sparkling wines gives many Australian producers a means of selling ordinary wine at a good profit. It also brings considerable joy to a handful of importers of French Champagne.

For the consumer, good value is to be found amongst Australian sparkling wines at and under $4 a bottle and amongst French Champagnes, many of which can now be found at bargain prices. In the middle ground, unless you like the sweeter Italian Spumantes, the pickings are very lean and in most cases best avoided.

Mounting competition is reducing margins for both local producers and for most French Champagne importers. Sparkling wine drinkers can therefore look forward to bargain buying for the foreseeable future.

Australians spend about $125 million a year on sparkling wine. That is about a quarter of all the money spent on wine. For producers with an established share of the market it is a highly profitable business. Seppelt’s profitability is dependent upon the growth of this ‘Champagne’ section of the market and it certainly contributes a healthy share to the profits of Penfolds and the Wynns–Seaview companies.

Table 1 indicates that the masses of cheap bubblies crowding the market place underpin many other wineries. Of the twenty or so wines that sell over 100,000 cases a year perhaps half are sparkling wines. Forgotten brands such as Golden Gate Spumante from Miranda Wines in Griffith or the Don Camillo brand distributed by Burns Philp sell close to 100,000 cases per year – a highly profitable business when these volumes are achieved. Representing a French Champagne house can be highly profitable as well. The distribution of Veuve Clicquot probably grosses Elder-Smiths over one million dollars a year.

We are not nearly as parochial in our tastes for sparkling wine as we are for wine in general. Only about 3% of the wine consumed in Australia is imported. Yet when it comes to bubbly about 17% of our money goes on imported products. We spend twelve million dollars a year on French Champagne, seven million dollars on Italian Spumante, and some two million dollars on German, Spanish and other imported bubblies.

About half of the $125 million dollars spent on bubbly is for wine either labelled or promoted as ‘Champagne’. This ‘Champagne’ segment would include nearly all of the bottle-fermented sparkling wines from Australia, France, and Spain but not Germany and Italy whose products are marketed commendably with distinctively different images.

In retail prices this ‘Champagne’ segment is polarised. At the bottom are the great bulk of Australian ‘Champagnes’ and a tiny amount of Spanish. At the top, with a minimum price of $13 are the French Champagnes. In between is a growing band of Australian sparkling wines with fancy prices but contents not much better than the $3.99 specials, a minute quantity of Spanish bubbly, and a mixed but small bag of méthode Champenoise wines from other parts of France.

The overall impression of this middle range is that either quality is not sufficiently better than the cheapies to warrant the extra expenditure or the price creeps so close to French Champagne that you might as well go the whole hog.

And if you want to go the whole hog, it is a buyer’s market. Despite the procession of titled Champagne company owners who have passed through Australia in the last few years, all with a slightly dazed look suggesting they can’t believe their good fortune, sales have levelled off after a boom in the late seventies, growing only 0.9% in 1982.

In Table 2 we compare the top 10 champagnes in 1982 with their performance in 1970. Only the entrenched market leaders Veuve Clicquot and Moet and Chandon and one or two others have been able to maintain their market shares without substantial discounting. Hence aggressive discounting by the distributors of brands with only small market shares is producing great bargains for the consumer.

It is not uncommon to see highly respected non-vintage Champagne being offered at $13 to $16 a bottle, and Vintage Champagne at $16 to $20. While the consumer is happy, neither the French nor their Australian agents are and we will certainly see more agency switching this year.

Now Champagne is a wonderful drink but even the French must be amazed at times about the amount of publicity that they are able to generate for it. But when you look at the wealth and organization of the region and the quality of its wine it is not really surprising.

The 24,000 hectares of Champagne vineyards in France’s far north will produce enough Champagne from the 1982 vintage to return its producers about $1.7 billion dollars. That is around three times larger than the retail value of the entire Australian wine industry. It has also made grape growing in this small area of land perhaps the most highly profitable primary pursuit in the world.

Not only is the industry large and wealthy, it is also strictly controlled, highly organised, and determined to extend its right to the exclusive use of the word ‘Champagne’.

In 1981, the half million litres of French Champagne that Australians consumed represented only 0.5% of French sales and 1.5% of exports. Although we are a small market to the French, in 1982 Australia and Venezuela were the only two markets to show some growth. It was interesting therefore to visit the Champagne region recently and to examine the myths and hard nose realities close up and to gauge French feeling for the Australian market.

Perhaps the most memorable quote was the most negative one. It was on the way to lunch with Madame Louise Danvers of Moet and Chandon that she made her off-hand remark: ‘We don’t care much about the Australian market. It’s too small’. Fair enough.

Moet may be number two in Australia but it represents less than 1% of their production. Moet and Chandon’s attitude could not be further from the industry one which sees us as very important in the long term. The other houses were most keen to have a presence here. For many of these we are already a major market. Bollinger for instance sends about 5% of her production to us, and Veuve Clicquot, second in size to Moet and Chandon, sells 3.5% of her Champagne to Australia.

While the Champenoise really have nothing to hide, they are most reluctant to expose new technology to the public gaze. Myth has its value. Everyone has seen the photographs of those hundreds of little men, the remenuers, scurrying around in the gloom of the underground caves, painstakingly shaking millions of bottles one at a time.

The bottles stand neck down in wooden racks and the patient shaking, turning and tilting moves the sediment of the secondary fermentation into the necks ready for removal. Machines that do the job quicker and cheaper and as well are being gradually deployed around Champagne. Now the casual visitor to Champagne would not see these machines. He would see the patient remueur at it.

Having prior knowledge of these machines, I found several houses happy to explain at length their experience with automated remuage.

Jean-Marc Charles Heidsieck pointed out that the machines gave considerable advantage if they were part of a total handling system. From 1982 the Charles Heidsieck group which includes Henriot, de Venoge, and Trouillard became automated.

At Taittinger a remarkable lady with the unlikely name of Wanda Wandell generously arranged an ad-hoc tour of their mechanised handling system. The myth endures but the hard nose reality is underway.

One enduring impression of the Champagne region was the emphasis on quality and the stunningly high standard of wines I was shown every day for 4 weeks. The industry as a whole channels enormous sums of money into all fields of technical research.

It came then as a little surprise recently when I read of a small tasting of predominantly 1976 Champagnes, where the tasters had apparently concluded that this $1.7 billion industry was technically incompetent. I am sure the participants will be forgotten long before the fabulous 1976 Champagnes are.

And yet there is hope for Australian sparkling wine. At this moment an enormous amount of activity is going on. Most hopefuls including Wynns, Ian Home at Smythesdale in Victoria, and Ian Cowell at Tumbarumba have set their hopes on the classic Champagne grape varieties of pinot noir, pinot meuniere, and chardonnay.

But I think anyone who has tasted the delights of Germany’s Deinhard Lila, a tank fermented riesling, or some of the refreshing and fruity Italian spumantes, will urge our winemakers not to be blinkered in their approach to grape variety and fermentation method.

In the meantime if you want a clean refreshing sparkling wine buy the local discounted product. If you want flavour and character as well as value for money, then French Champagne is the thing to buy.

TABLE 1

Sparkling wine by country of origin – estimated volume and value, 12 months from 1 May 1981 to 30 April 1982

Country of origin	Bottle fermented ‘000 litres	Bottle fermented Value $’000	Other methods ‘000 litres	Other methods Value $’000	All sparkling ‘000 litres	All sparkling Value $’000	% share litres	% share $
Australia	7,162	50,000	20,288	54,000	27,450	104,000	94.04	83.00
Italy	187	1,500	693	5,500	880	7,000	3.01	5.50
France	627	12,500	24	200	651	12,700	2.23	10.20
Germany	29	200	43	400	72	600	0.25	0.50
Spain	100	700	–	–	100	700	0.34	0.60
Other	32	200	5	30	37	230	0.13	0.20
TOTAL	8,137	65,100	21,053	60,130	29,190	125,230	100.00	100.00

TABLE 2

Bottles of Champagne exported from France to Australia
The top ten in 1982 compared with their performance in 1970

Brand	1982	Quantity and position in 1970
Veuve Clicquot	193,352	44,602 (1)
Moet and Chandon	142,440	11,952 (4)
Pol Roger	69,164	4,716 (6)
Bollinger	61,502	2,328 (12)
Deutz	43,338	964 (15)
Laurent Perrier	34,532	1,060 (14)
Mumm	24,260	9,404 (5)
Lanson	23,074	3,132 (9)
Charles Heidsieck	22,120	14,952 (3)
Taittinger	18,144	2,400 (11)
TOTAL MARKET	(38 brands)	(about 30 brands)
ALL BRANDS	758,677	138,497

First published around November 1982 in the Australian Financial Review

Published on this archive 1 September 2026