I opened up a Cristal for NYE. But what is a basketball hat?
The price increases on most of the name brands have been ridiculous over the past 10 years, all the while the producers continue to complain about how people are drinking less champagne. Simple economics at work. A lot of folks have shifted to prosecco and cava because of the pricing.
Let’s remember that the people on this board are a minutia of the market. We don’t keep these producers alive. The folks that do aren’t dropping $45-$65 a bottle for mass produced baseline cuvees.
Yup. the only thing that reducing production volume will do is reduce their own warehouse capacity requirements. End customers dont care if you’ve produced 100k, 1M or 10M bottles of the same champagne if it doesnt impact pricing.
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Yes, great point. If you sell X of something and you make 2X, you don’t sell more because you start to only make X and don’t change your pricing. You just cut expenses of making unsold product.
So if the producers do that, what do they do with all the grapes that they’ve grown that hasn’t gone into making champagne? I guess sell them off for some revenue. Or here’s an idea. Start making still wines. A fun fact is that prior to the latter part of the 19th century, most of the wine made in the Champagne region was actually still wine, not sparkling.
I dont know the champagne system well enough, but perhaps more growers will use this to pad out their libraries? Or will the grapes get completely unused and just written off? I’m sure one of the local experts could give us a good indication of whats likely to happen
My naive expectation is that they’ll just stop harvesting as many grapes, but I could be wrong
WaWa. My revenue is down 50 percent in Q4 from last year.
Given a shifting climate I think still wines will be at least part of Champagne’s future. Maybe not for most of us but also not as far off as we might hope. I seem to remember one of the growers featured in one of the Zooms hosted by Frank Murray essentially saying that still wine was the future of Champagne. Honestly for myself I would kinda like if there was both. I wouldn’t be shocked at all if some vineyards made better still wine that sparkling in some vintages if not most. Even if anyone would admit that they are obviously held back by regulation and market forces.