Each month the Cellar
Watch Market Report reviews the monthly regional share of trade by value on
Liv-ex. The last six months have seen Bordeaux’s share falling. It has hovered
around 85%, an historically low figure (in the past few years it frequently
accounted for over 95% each month). Bordeaux hit a new yearly low in August
with just 82.7% of trade: in the last three and a half years it has gone below
this number only twice, once in January 2009 and once in December 2011. A year
beforehand it had taken 94.5%.
It follows on from Bordeaux’s drop in trade share that other
regions are making gains. The graph below shows the average regional split of
trade over the last six years. In 2006, 2010 and 2011 Bordeaux’s taking was so
great that on the whole the other regions barely scraped above 1% each. In
other years, Burgundy is the most dominant force. As buyers diverge, 2012 has
seen all regions take an historically sizeable share of trade. It is
interesting to note that Italian wines have risen in popularity, with the
region taking an average of more than 2% of trade by value for the first time
in the last six years. It has also taken more trade in the past two years than
Champagne – a region that took over three times its share of trade in 2007 and
2008.
