[Press release, wine professionals]
The preliminary export figures released by Statistik Austria for March 2013 show that sales revenues for Austria’s domestic wine sector reached yet another historic record in 2012. According to the figures, the total volume of exports reached 47.4 million liters with a total value of € 132.2 million, each reflecting an increase of approximately 5% over last year’s totals. This is highly impressive, especially because expectations for the wine exports had been dampened because of the small 2012 grape harvest and the resulting higher domestic demand.
The reason for the continuous rise in export revenue and the record sales is the upswing in bottled wine exports and the simultaneous, significant drop in barrel (bulk) wine figures. In 2002, the amount of barrel wine exported (55 million liters) was nearly three times higher than that of bottled wine (19.5 million liters). In 2012, however, the quantity of bottled wines exported was five times higher than that of barrel wines (40 million liters of bottled wines; 7.3 million liters of barrel wines). This reflects the massive shift in market share of the single price categories both abroad and at home – the moving away from cheap products to the price-quality segments between € 3 and € 6.
“In 2012, Austrian winemakers significantly increased their quotas also in the most important export market, Germany,” said Willi Klinger, general manager of the Austrian Wine Marketing Board. “In addition to strong increases in the main export markets of Germany, Switzerland, the USA and the Netherlands, ongoing export initiatives are bearing fruit in difficult markets like China and Japan as well.”