Brands Report 2022: Champagne

There wasn’t a huge amount to celebrate last year, but it doesn’t take much of an occasion for champagne corks to fly in the world’s best bars – almost 90% of our bars stock the French sparkler. Three-quarters have two champers and two-thirds have three or more.

The marque with the most is Moët & Chandon. In the 10 years we’ve been asking about champagne, the Moet-Hennessy/ Diageo brand has never finished outside the top two – and it’s had more firsts than seconds. As the bestselling champagne globally its brand awareness carries into the bar domain and, when you throw in the incentives o en associated with being part of a wider portfolio, Moët makes sense. But there is another factor at play too: this is one of the most consistent wines out there. When you’re making sparkling cocktails, year-to-year or even bottle-to-bottle vagaries are a moving part you can do without.

All that said, it was extremely tight at the top, with both Moët & Chandon and Pernod Ricard’s  flagship Perrier-Jouët both sharing 12 house pour listings each. Moët edges it as it was more likely to be among the support cast of champagnes. But if those two are the key brands in this channel, LVMH is the indisputable top brass of the category, contributing four brands to our list. Its yellow-labelled Veuve Clicquot manages to be a volume player and retain its cool credentials – it backs up last year’s number one spot with a respectable third (8% made it their house, 26% a top-three pour) and topped our trending league. Its stablemate Dom Perignon is the big-ticket champagne that does well in high-end bars – particularly hotels. It was found to be the number one bubbles in 10% of our polled bars and a top-three serve in about a quarter.

Billecart-Salmon, meanwhile, has always been an on-trade favourite, last year finishing as high as third. The medium-sized marque, which targets this sector, was the house champagne in 9% of the bars we polled, and part of the repertoire in a fifth.

Ruinart, another LVMH brand, is down one to sixth, with 18% of bars stocking it among their top-three selection, while Pernod Ricard’s Mumm was in eighth with 11%. Bollinger performed similarly – with one less house pour listing – while Louis Roederer finds its way into our ranking for the first time since 2017.

Tattinger makes its fourth appearance in our list of champagnes – every time in 10th position.

                                                                                                  

Methodology

The results of this report are the culmination of a questionnaire of 106 bars around the world, each cherry-picked to take part based on their performance in global bar awards. We aim to find out not only which brands sell best but also what’s trending. These two data sets give us an insight into the brands that are doing the most volume and the brands that are hot right now.

To read more on the methodology of the Brands Report click here.