Sherry has always been an export wine, most of
it was exported, and that has even played a part in its style, but the current
picture is one of decline in most of the export markets. The Sherry revolution
which has done so much to restore the wine’s prestige and allowed modest price
increases has yet to be reflected in sales volumes.
In the first 6 months of 2018 total volumes
slipped by 3.2% to 14 million litres, half a million fewer than in the same
period of 2017 and 10% fewer than in 2016. Export and domestic sales volumes
are slowly heading towards par with export sales of 7.6 million litres and 6.3
in Spain in the first 6 months of 2018. After an encouraging 2017 for domestic
sales, they have slipped back by 2.54% while exports have slipped by 3.75%.
Taken over the last 2 years, Spain has slipped by 1.77% but exports by a
worrying 16%.
The traditional export markets, led by Britain,
Holland and Germany, still imported the majority of exports with a total of 6.7
million litres between January and June, but the European market as a whole saw
the biggest sales drop, some 4%, mainly because of a drop of 1.9 million litres
or 17% in Holland, which imports a great deal of BOB. This negates the good
results in Germany and the rest of Europe where sales actually grew by 2.6% and
6.7% respectively with volumes of 0.9 and 1.1 million litres. Britain was the
biggest of all markets till it was overtaken by Spain in the last few years,
but is still the largest export market, and showed no change at just over 2.7
million litres.
Things are a little more optimistic in the
Americas with first half sales of 785,000 litres, 600,000 of which went to the
US, showing growth of about 4.5%. Asia however, showed a drop of 6.3% as a
whole to 109,000 litres, 80,000 of which went to Japan which grew by around 18%.
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