Wine Sales Outpace Beer Sales
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It’s an old joke that liquor sales go up in times of economic crisis, but it happens to be grounded in fact. In their 2008/2009 fiscal year, Canada’s liquor retailers sold $19.4 billion dollars worth of alcohol – an increase of three per cent over the previous year’s numbers, according to Statistics Canada.
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Across the country, Saskatchewan, Nunavut and Nova Scotia reported the largest increases in their alcohol-related revenue, while Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta were the largest contributors to the country’s escalating beer sales, which increased by 2.2 per cent over the previous year.
Here’s the important news if you happen to be a barley farmer and not a grape farmer: beer: while beer remains the most popular alcoholic beverage in terms of volume and dollar value, its share of the alcohol market has been on the decline.
Beer sales peaked in 1993, when beer made up 53 per cent of sales and wine made up 18 per cent. Since then, however, beer has gone down to 46 per cent, while wine has leapt ahead to make up 29 per cent of alcohol sales.
Imported beer has seen growth over the past decade, doubling its market share to 13 per cent of the current beer market in Canada – an increase over its six per cent share in 1999.
Wine sales increased 4.6 per cent this fiscal over the previous year, with wineries and liquor retailers reporting $5.7 billion worth of sales in the 2008/2009 fiscal year. Volume-wise, that’s 441.4 million litres of wine being sold – a 3.8 per cent increase. Unlike the trend in beer sales, domestic wine has outpaced imported wines and has more sales.
The strength of the domestic wine industry is primarily due to the current popularity of red wine. Red wine sales, including reds and rose wines, made up 64 per cent of the total volume of all wines (red and white) sold.
Red wine dollar sales have more than doubled, with an increase of 161 per cent between 2000 and 2009. White wine sales have increased as well, but at a slower pace – 50 per cent over the same period. Slightly more than 24 per cent of all the red wine sold in Canada were red, white wine made up about 39 per cent of domestic sales.
