France had its own Wirtschaftswunder, only in wine. For 25 years the export looked like a miracle of rising value: volume shrank 17 percent, while revenue doubled. In 2000, France shipped 15.1 million hectolitres for €5.5 billion; by 2025 that was 12.5 million hectolitres for €11.2 billion. Average export price climbed from €3.66 to €8.90 per litre. The figures come from customs data updated by the statistics bureau Agreste on 17 July.
Sell less, earn more: they call the strategy premiumisation. It grew revenue while ever less wine passed through the gate, and it carried the French wine trade for a quarter of a century. The books kept balancing, even as sales had been falling for years; rising prices masked a shrinking volume.
Champagne is the cork holding that strategy in place: on its own good for a third of export value in 2025, and together with other sparkling wines for nearly 38 percent.
The engine sputters
The model has recently begun to show wear. Export value peaked in 2023 at almost €12 billion, then fell two years running, to €11.2 billion in 2025. Average price per litre slipped over the same period from €9.42 to €8.90. The interim figures for 2026 confirm the trend: in the first five months, volume dropped 2.8 percent, while value fell 4.9 percent. Value is falling faster than volume, and for this well-oiled export machine that is something new.
A single set of figures explains only part of the decline; American import tariffs, a collapsed Chinese wine market in which France is also losing ground to Australia, and falling global wine consumption each play a role. The direction is clear regardless: the era of prices rising on their own is ending.
The colour shift
Beneath those totals, a second shift is under way. Ten years ago 39 percent of French export volume was white; in 2025 it is 47 percent. Red and rosé fell over that decade from 8.6 to 6.6 million hectolitres, more than a fifth less, while white grew slightly. At the current pace, white will overtake red and rosé in French exports within a few years.
That breakdown deserves a caveat because French customs counts red and rosé as a single category. The market sees it differently. According to the OIV, rosé is a distinct third colour and a growth market: global production rose a quarter between 2001 and 2021, its consumption share to around 9 percent. White and rosé together form the light segment that accounts for more than half of world consumption; red fell from above 50 percent around the turn of the century to roughly 47 percent. The OIV calls that a structural shift in preferences.
So the customs category conceals the tilt rather than exaggerating it. Within ‘red and rosé’, rosé is growing, which means the real fall of red runs deeper than the export figures above suggest. France itself illustrates the turning point most sharply: in 2023 the country produced, according to its own agricultural statistics, more white wine than red for the first time.
Suppose Brussels imposes this format on Paris; then the French have nothing to answer for. It simply suits them rather well. Hear that a restaurant is going under, and you stop eating there; hence every party with an interest engages in window dressing, and a country with a national wine sector has that interest above all. Either way, the standard breakdown shows red’s fall as gentler than the market feels it.
The Netherlands reaches the tipping point
The Dutch market is going through that shift now, and it starts with the drinker. Dutch preference has been shifting towards white and fresh for years. Research for the Dutch wine trade already signalled a clearly rising share of white wine around 2017, and red has lost further ground to lighter styles since.
French export figures mirror that changed demand, and do so strikingly. In 2024 France shipped more white to the Netherlands than red and rosé combined for the first time; in 2025 the gap widened to 51.5 million litres of white against 48.5 million litres of red and rosé. That reversal reaches further than the French production shift of 2023, where white only had to pass red because rosé counts separately.
Premiumisation shows sharply in the Dutch market too. The Netherlands bought around 100 million litres of French wine in 2025, a third less than the 154 million litres of 2000, at nearly double the price per litre: €4.39 against €2.31 back then. Tellingly, the Netherlands moves against the global trend in early 2026: volume fell 5.5 percent, while value actually rose 2.4 percent. The Dutch market continues to premiumise, then, where the world market cools.
The real fault line runs overseas
On the European ranking of decline the Netherlands sits mid-table. Of the large markets studied, Denmark lost the most volume since 2000: 64 percent. The United Kingdom (down 48 percent), Germany (down 46) and Switzerland (down 44) follow; the Netherlands (down 35) and Belgium (down 31) held up relatively well. Germany stands out twice over: an almost halved volume at a value that barely moved. Premiumisation largely passed Germany by.
The genuine fault line, meanwhile, runs clean across the ocean. The large traditional West European markets bought less; the United States took 47 percent more volume and Canada held steady, both at roughly doubled value. France, then, lost mainly in its own backyard over the past quarter-century.
The United States is thereby the largest and the only grown export market of any size, good for €1.9 billion in export value. American import tariffs therefore strike precisely the one market where French wine exports still grew over the past 25 years.
The Dutch stay frugal all the while. Belgium pays €5.27 per litre of French wine on average, Germany €4.58, the Netherlands €4.39. The cliché of the Calvinist wine buyer sits right there in the customs statistics.
The hardest blow
Within the decline of red wine exports, one region is the symbol of everything at once: falling volume, stalling price build-up, and a colour strategy as a flight forward. Beaujolais lost 81 percent of its export volume worldwide since 2000, and towards the Netherlands as much as 96 percent. The usual story points to Beaujolais Nouveau; the figures tell a different, more uncomfortable one. A separate article zooms in on a region in free fall: Beaujolais almost vanished from the Dutch market.
Source: Agreste / Direction générale des douanes et droits indirects (DGDDI), dataset D_0015, ‘Echanges extérieurs de vins de la France’, updated 17 July 2026. Additional: OIV, ‘Evolution de la production et de la consommation mondiales de vin par couleur’. Analysis: Winecastr.com.
This article first appeared in Dutch on Winecastr.com. The English version was produced with AI assistance and edited by the author.
Last updated: 18 September 2026