In France you drink French wines. With the variety that exists in this huge wine country, you never get tired of French wines. But the fact is that the French drink more and more foreign wines. An study on wine sales in big grocery stores (where most wines are sold) shows a rise in recent years for non-French wines. These now represent 7% in volume and 4% in value.
Spain dominates and without having examined the matter in detail, we guess that it is mostly cheap wines that are imported from the southern neighbour. Other countries with significant volumes are Italy, Portugal, Morocco and South Africa. In smaller volumes, wines from most wine countries around the world are sold, but mostly in smaller, specialized wine stores.
From our own (unscientific) experience it is clear that today you can find much more “foreign” wines at all price levels than 10 years ago. Yet another example of the increasingly international wine market; today 40% of all wine is consumed in another country than where it was made. In 2000 the number was 20%.
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