Just 10 years ago, you'd have been laughed out of the room if you suggested that Champagne was a hard sell. What a difference a couple of decades makes.
Champagne has long been admired as a region that has carved a niche at the top end of the wine market, with venerable houses selling expensive wines to a seemingly ever-thirsty consumer. Until it suddenly wasn't.
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The year of Covid, 2020, is often cited as the start of Champagne's troubles, but sales were already sliding before that. Covid, however, accelerated the slide and even a bumper year for exports in 2022 couldn't paper over the cracks. It was followed by three years of continuous decline both at home and abroad, as consumers turned their attention to other sparkling wine types.
The Covid-driven inflation of 2020-2024 has seen consumers tighten their belts and move over to Prosecco, Cava and Crémant, rather than Champagne's heavy hitters. The shift away from wine generally – particularly in the US – has hit Champagne hard.
Growers in Champagne are also under pressure as Champagne houses – who buy the growers' grapes to make their own cuvées – tighten their belts in turn and the Scrooge effect shuffles down the line to the poor farmer trying to make a dollar out of growing grapes. Throw in climatic changes, increased disease pressure, increased pesticide spraying and it's quickly apparent that the Champenois' lot is not a happy one.
It's hard to explain succinctly how it all came to this. It hasn't just been Champagne, of course – wine generally has been taken a series of damaging body blows over the past few years, but it seems to be perfectly crystallized in Champagne.
It might be around this point that you'd expect to hear a big "ah, but..." And you'd be right; there is a big but here: while sales might be dwindling, interest in Champagne is rising. The growth in Champagne seaarches across our database – at least for the prestige cuvées – is booming and that offers at least the faintest hint of hope for not just Champagne, but for the wider wine world.
In the 12 months to the end of March, Champagne search figures leaped by 14 percent over the previous 12 months, to outstrip the 2022/23 period by almost half a million searches. That's after two years of falls (by more than 2 percent in 2023/24 and more than 8 percent in 2024/25); the contrast between 2024/25 and 2025/26 is stark, with almost two million more searches in the most recent period.
The searches came mostly from the US, with 43 percent share of all searches, but South Korea was impressive in capturing second place, ahead of the UK (once the most important market for Champagne), Hong Kong and France. The broader Asia-Pacific region (South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan) collectively accounted for more than 20 percent of search interest.
The list of most-wanted Champagnes is heavily weighted towards the prestige cuvées, as searchers look for wines that offer quality and longevity, as well as investment potential. Let's see what they are.
Well, take a bow, Dom Pérignon. Not only does it have three separate entries in the top 10, but the top wine leads by a huge margin, with more than twice the number of searches as the second-placed wine.
In the wider top 25 list, Dom manages to squeeze in another entry, too, pipping Bollinger's three cuvées. But whether you concentrate on the top 10 or top 25, the list is heavily skewed towards the top end of Champagne; there isn't a single non-prestige cuvée to be found.
There is virtually no change from last year, bar the inclusion of Pol Roger's Winston Churchill cuvée at the expense of Krug's Clos de Mesnil, and there hasn't been much movement on price, either. The biggest rise in the global average retail price of any of the cuvées listed is $27 for the Krug, a rise of just 5 percent.
Hope springs eternal for many wine lovers and while the news has been uniformly depressing for the past two years, perhaps we really are peeking around the mythical corner – or at least we might be able to see the corner up ahead in the distance.
But who'd have thought that the long-troubled soils of Champagne would be where the seeds of optimism would germinate first?
