The value of Spain’s wine exports increased 1.4% to €2.98bn ($3.13bn) last year, although the rise came as volumes slid 5% to around 1.9 billion litres.
The figures mark “the second best year” for Spain in terms of the value of its wine exports, the OEMV said. The organisation said the best year had been 2022, when they hit just over €3bn.
However, export volumes were last as low in 2013, when they sat at 1.8 billion litres.
In 2024, the UK was the main market for bottled wines (includes all wines under 2 litres besides aromatised and sparkling) in value and volumes.
Value grew 1% on the previous year to €252m while volumes were up 1.6% at 84.3 million litres. The US was the second largest market for Spanish wine exports in value terms in 2024, growing 5.6% to €246.7m.
Other key markets such as The Netherlands, saw value grow 13.7% to €118.2m, while volumes were up 9.1% at 40.6 million litres.
Germany, the third largest market for Spanish bottled wine exports in value terms, saw value drop 6.5% to €172.3m. The market also came in second in terms of volumes, reaching 76.4 million litres, a 6% drop on 2023.
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Bulk wines (wines in containers over 10 litres), increased 1.7% in value last year, reaching 523.6m, and a 6.9% dip in volume to 1 billion litres.
Earlier this month, new figures from the Spanish Rioja region’s control board revealed shipments of the wine had grown more than 4% in 2024, driven by exports to the UK and US.
More than 98.8m litres of Rioja was sold outside Spain last year, an increase of 4.4%, data from the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja showed.
Exports to the UK, the largest market for Rioja outside Spain, grew 12% in volume terms to just under 32.4m litres.
In the US, volume sales increased 17% to 10.4m litres.
Exported volumes volumes of Rioja to Germany dropped 5% to 11.7m litres. Germany is the third-largest market for the wine variety.
While the category’s nuances may be elusive, an image of Australian Shiraz is alive and well in the U.S. market, and it stems all the way back to the 1990s. “Australian Shiraz had its heyday in the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when Robert Parker scores were paramount and Yellow Tail came on the scene,” says Lopes.
Australia had all the elements needed to produce the international style of red wine that was in demand at that time: warm, sunny wine regions that produced healthy, ripe grapes with ease; a well-established red variety (some plantings of Shiraz date back to the 1800s) with a penchant for fruity, full-bodied styles; and a fun, easy-to-understand marketing approach that featured cute Australian critters.
The wines were highly popular in the U.S., but by the mid-2000s, demand started to wane as Shiraz became overly big and alcoholic, chasing higher and higher scores. Then, global events caused U.S. imports of those wines to take a hit.
