by Jürgen Mathäß and Victor de la Serna
The Minister of Agriculture has just published data on the production and sales of Spanish wines in the past fiscal year. According to those statistics, Rioja is the largest marketer of DO wines and Germany Spain s biggest export market.
Sales of DO wines reached 11.69 million hectolitres over the past twelve months. Although La Mancha is the by far largest DO region by size, a large portion of its wines are marketed as table wines. Rioja, the second largest region, leads in pure sales with 2.47 million hectolitres from its 63,000 hectares of vineyard. Cava is second with 1.67 million hectolitres and La Mancha third with 1.01 million hectolitres. The small region of Jerez, with only 10,000 hectares, is fourth in volume at 0.61 million hectolitres.
Although more than 60 percent of Spain s 645,000 hectares of vineyard has DO status, only about a third of the total production of 39.7 million hectolitres was bottled as DO wine. Nearly 17 percent, or 6.65 million hectolitres, was distilled.
While demand for white table wines is only half of that for reds, the share of white wine in total production remains about 50 percent.
In 2005 wine exports were down slightly in both volume and value. A total of 1,444 million hectolitres was exported at a value of 1.58 billion Euros, a decrease of 1.7% in volume and 1.3% in value. Germany remains the largest market with 19.4% of total value. The United Kingdom is second with 17%, USA third with 10.3% and France fourth with 9.7%.
