Prosecco is on fire, women buy more wine than men, and football isn't just for beer.
The glass is more than
half-full when it comes to wine sales and consumption in the United
States, according to Danny Brager, the man in charge of research into
alcohol at Nielsen, the global measurement company.
Beer, wine
and spirits are growing faster both in volume and in value than the
overall consumer packaged goods in the United States, Brager told trade
members who braved a blizzard to hear him at the annual Wine Market
Council gathered at New York's Museum of Modern Art on Monday.
"We
can see the average retail price for wine is up 3.3 percent; that can
happen for two reasons," he said. "It can happen because people are
raising prices, or it can happen because consumers are trading it up. In
this case, not all of it, but almost all of it is because consumers are
trading up. Instead of buying a bottle of wine for $10 you're buying a
bottle of wine for $12; instead of buying it for $15, you're buying it
for $20."
Women continue to buy wine more often than men, 39
percent to 34 percent and favor it both on- and off-premise, according
to a Nielsen survey of 1202 US women conducted in November. A separate
survey conducted by the global research firm found sparkling wine
remains on fire driven by Prosecco. Annual share of US sales of
sparkling wine were up 9 percent by value, 5.5 percent by volume and the
average price was $11.57 for a bottle.
Drilling down a little further into the numbers, Brager found that the value of sales of
Prosecco in 2015 was up 35.5 percent, the volume of Prosecco sales was up 34.3 percent, and the average price for a bottle was $11.99.
Champagne,
by comparison, saw an increase in the value of the wine of 9.1 percent;
an increase in the volume of 6 percent and an average price of $51.54.
Some
31 percent of the growth of Prosecco came from consumers who had not
bought a bottle of sparkling wine in the prior year. "Another third are
people who had bought sparkling wine before, but now are buying more,"
Brager said.
It's not just wine that is seeing growth – it's all
three categories of alcoholic beverages; beer, wine and spirits. But, of
the $216 billion that US consumers spend on booze annually, beer is
steadily losing market share. Wine accounts for just $32bn, while
spirits account for $80bn.
Beer
is slightly less than half at $104bn – and falling. Since 2005,
Nielsen's research shows that beer has steadily been losing market share
– dropping to 47.9 percent in 2015 from 52.7 percent a decade earlier.
Wine's market share has been holding fairly steady at just under 15
percent.
The Super Bowl, the climax of the American football
season, is set for Sunday, February 7. When the Carolina Panthers meet
the Denver Broncos, more than 114 million people will be watching on
television, where the cost for a 30-second advertisement reached $4.5m
last year. Some 55m women are going to be watching, according to Nielsen
research. But, in many minds, it is a sport synonymous with beer.
Brager
noted that the week leading up to the Super Bowl "generates 9 percent
more wine sales than the average of the three weeks prior" – the same
percentage lift as beer. "Many people think of Super Bowl as a beer
thing, but it's not just a beer thing at all," he said.
Getting
back to table wine, he noted a distinct divide at around $10 a bottle.
Wines below $7.99 a bottle represent almost 60 percent of the volume
sales in the US market, but that percentage is shrinking. It is down
almost 7 percent by volume and nearly 6 percent by value.
But wines that sell by the bottle for more than $10.99 are seeing double-digit grow in both value and volume sales.
"I
would suggest that taking prices up in our market – as fragmented as it
is – is a pretty risky thing to do. Consumers have a lot of choice," he
said.
