Are you more of a red wine or white wine type? The answer is never uniform and varies according to prices, times, desires and opportunities, but unlike rosé wines, whose weather-sensitive consumption explodes during the summer, reds and whites play the game throughout the year, especially in our regions, where the most widespread grape varieties, gamay and chardonnay in Burgundy, syrah and viognier in the Rhône valley, are at the origin of the production of most white wines and red.
The price factor
However, white wines seem to have won in terms of consumption. They are today the most consumed wines in France, ahead of rosé wines and red wines.
According to the Nielsen IQ study (2023) on the consumption of controlled designations of origin in France, white wines gained the favor of 192,000 French households in three years (2019-2022) while reds lost more than 600 000 and rosés almost 300,000. According to this same study, “price is a primary marker of choice, which can partly explain the attraction for white wines, less expensive than reds”. The price of a single bottle of white wine would be 7.83 euros on average, compared to 10.58 euros for red wines. White wines have also found their place as an aperitif.
The commercial battle is all the more bitter as it takes place in a declining wine market. Consumption is very clearly on a downward trend. Between the 1960s and 2022, the average individual consumption of wine by the French, for example, fell by almost 70%, according to another study (2022), this time carried out by Ipsos Observer for FranceAgriMer and the National Committee of Wine Interprofessions.
Internationally, the trends are generally identical. “Over the past decades, the global wine sector has seen an overall positive trend in the production and consumption of white and rosé wines, while red wines have declined,” observes the International Organization of Vine and Wine .
Swiss
