Shops get a pop from champagne

Sales of sparkling wines are bubbling over at U.S. and local wine retailers.

Champagne 101

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By Mark Fisher, Staff Writer Updated 2:53 PM Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Wine retailers in the Dayton area and across the country are toasting a resurgence in interest in champagne and other sparkling wines as they gear up for what they hope is an effervescent Christmas and New Year’s Eve shopping season.

After seeing sales tumble as the recession hit, champagne shipments were up nearly 22 percent comparing the first six months of this year to the same period in 2010, with a total of 7.5 million bottles shipped to the U.S. as of June, the Washington-based Champagne Bureau told The Associated Press. From July 2010 to June 2011, 18.3 million bottles were shipped, about a 20 percent increase over the July 2009-June 2010 period. The Wall Street Journal reported that annual sales of champagne in 2011 may approach the record 339 million bottles shipped in 2007. The figures refer to “real” champagne, which comes from the specific region of France of the same name.

“There definitely has been an increase in interest in champagne in the last year and a half or so,” said Mif Frank, co-owner of Arrow Wine & Spirits’ Far Hills Avenue store in Kettering. “There was a lull between the millennium and a few years ago, when interest was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a little flat.”

But consumers have rekindled their love affair with sparkling wine, in part because the beverage is crisp and clean, is no longer thought of as exclusively a special-occasion wine, and benefited from a surge of interest in Prosecco, a sparkling wine from a region in Italy, Frank said.

The trend also may be due to people spending more, between $30 and $50 on a bottle of wine, Gwendolyn Osborn, wine expert for national online retailer Wine.com, told the AP. And Dom Perignon 2002, which has a price tag of around $160, jumped from 67th place last year to No. 27 on the website’s best-seller list this year.

The ’02 “Dom” is sold at Arrow as part of a gift pack with two flute-style glasses for $169.99 — and the wine is selling “as well as I can ever remember,” Frank said. “All of the big boys (expensive champagnes) are selling better.”

Arrow’s Far Hills store launched a drop-in sparkling wine tasting last year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and it was plenty successful enough to repeat this year, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Dec. 27. The other Arrow store on Lyons Road in Washington Twp. will host its own sparkling wine tasting Dec. 29. And Dorothy Lane Market’s Oakwood store will host a sparkling-wine tasting Dec. 28.

“All of our staff here appreciates champagne,” Frank said. “And when you like something, it’s a lot easier to sell.”

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