Spain has outstripped France and Italy to become the world’s biggest wine exporter, exporting 22.8 million hectoliters last year, a 22 percent rise on the previous year.
However, because much of it was bulk sales with small margins, the Spanish wine industry’s profits were down 2.2 percent.
France is now the biggest buyer of Spanish wines, importing and bottling — often as French wine — 5.8 million hectoliters last year, 40 percent more than the previous year. One hectoliter is equivalent to 133.3 bottles.
It is cheaper for the French to import the wine than to grow it themselves. The next biggest buyers after France were Germany, Portugal and Russia.
The situation mirrors in many respects the Spanish olive oil industry. About 40 percent of Spanish production is exported in bulk to Italy, where it is rebottled and sold as estate bottled Italian olive oil.
Selling wine in bulk is easy and cheap, but the margins are small and it perpetuates the image of Spain as a purveyor of plonk, whereas several regions produce wine that is among the best in the world.
PERCEPTION PROBLEM
As with olive oil, it is a problem of marketing and perception. Most good Spanish wine is little known outside Spain or even the region where it is produced.
Gerard Ventura, of the Jane Ventura bodega just south of Barcelona, said it is easier to find his wine in Berlin than in Barcelona where people continue to buy rioja even though Catalonia produces some of the finest reds in Europe.
RIOJA OVER-PRODUCTION
Rioja is practically the only wine region that non-Spaniards are familiar with although, like bordeaux, it suffers from over-production.
Wine from the northern regions of Ribera del Duero and Navarra is less widely known largely because the bodegas do little to market their wines outside Spain.
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