Italy is becoming the world star of the excellent wines market. That is the opinion of the experts at Liv-ex, the global par excellence marketplace for fine wines. A profoundly changed market and the lockdown due to coronavirus global health emergency helped to accelerate some established trends.
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More and more online shopping and trading on the web, in turn, has helped to expand the range of wines labels from different countries by increasing the prices of some brands and, in other cases, even driving the entry of new ones. All these phenomena have first of all contributed to widen the market, with a disruptive effect: they have broken France’s total dominance.
HOW EXCELLENT WINES MARKET IS CHANGING
“We are witnessing the decline of the Bordeaux wines,” says Justin Gibbs, co-founder of Liv-ex. In 2010, the peak year of boom demand from China, Bordeaux covered 96% of the market. Now its sales have fallen to 48%. Bordeaux’s decline had previously benefited the French ‘brothers’ from Burgundy, which last year reached the top of their market share: 20%. But this year, there share loss accounts for 15%.
“The buyers have spread their wings,” comments Gibbs, “flying beyond the two French territories, and venturing out into the world”. In April alone, the number of different labels increased by 30% in the U.S., Spain, Australia, and Germany: wine labels of these countries are making their way into Liv-ex. But the real stars are Italian wine labels, which until six years ago alone accounted for only 2% of the labels traded on the London platform.
ITALY’S OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCES
This year the Italian wine market was driven by the excellent performance of Sangiovese Soldera 2015, one of the iconic wines of Montalcino and Tuscany. It is the second most traded label in the world with a price of 4,400 pounds. The Soldera ‘Case Basse’ pushed the price of Italian wines traded in the last week of April to 27.7%. Since the beginning of 2020, the average price has settled at 22.5%. Another Tuscan wine, Ornellaia 2017, is in fifth place with a price of 1,330 ppounds.
The performance of Italian wines benefited, among other things, from the non-application of additional US duties. Among the 5 most traded labels we can also find Barolo Riserva Monfortino 2013 by Giacomo Conterno (the most traded wine of the first quarter, for a 7,400 pounds price) and Barolo Bricco Viole 2016 by Vajra.