Local wine trends
(Part 1)
HAPPY Year of the Wood Dragon! Entering this new lunar year, I want to share my personal thoughts on the current wine trend in our country based on my interaction, conversation, and my own experience within the wine circle.
We just concluded a relatively tough year from a wine business standpoint in 2023, but this was understandable as the wine industry was coming off a huge boom year in 2022, bolstered by the presidential election and genuine revenge spending postCOVID. Still, the outlook and potential are quite good as from the estimated imports of 12-million-liters of wine, and with our population of 110 million, the per capita wine consumption is still just a trickle, like seven tablespoonfuls. There is so much room to grow.
Australian-produced wines are still the most popular Moscato wines sold in the country. From Yellow Tail, Gossips, to Hardys, Australian Moscato dominates the market in two of the three shades/colors: white and pink, but not red. Based on statistics from stateowned wineaustralia.com, wine exports to Philippines decreased by 7.4% in 2023 from 2022, yet Moscato as a varietal bucked this trend when it still grew by a decent 3%. The same study showed that since 2020, exports to Philippines of Moscato grew more than tenfold.
Other Moscato-producing countries include Italy (southeastern Piedmont is the origin of this varietal and is also where Philippine’s most popular sweet sparkling wine, Asti Spumante, comes from), then there is Chile and the US.*
Prior to the Australian domination of Moscato, it was no more than just an ordinary varietal, and was not mentioned in the same commercial sphere as a Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, or even Sauvignon Blanc. This varietal was available to us locally though, thanks to the top-selling market leader, the US brand Carlo Rossi, which started selling their Red Muscat back in the early 2000s. Carlo Rossi relabelled Red Muscat as Red Moscato (it is the same varietal) to capitalize on the “Moscato” craze.
But now Moscato — the original white version — is fast catching up to Chardonnay as the most popular white varietal in the country, while the pink counterpart has bested California-created White Zinfandel as most popular pink or rosé varietal in the Philippines. I believe this trend will continue as Filipinos just have a sweet- tooth and I don’t really see this waning in the coming years.
American wines, primarily from California, still dominate the Philippine wine market with over one-third of total wine imports to the country. Carlo Rossi, the omnipresent Californian wine brand from the largest private winery in the world, E&J Gallo, solidly dominates the market, mainly with their generic California Red and California White variants.
In the past, Californian wines were too polarized
— they were either the entry-level generic wines, which included the likes of Carlo Rossi, Almaden,
Franzia, Paul Mason (rebranded as Paul Madison recently), or the premium American Viticultural Area (AVA) or appellation-labeled Napa and Sonoma wines that included illustrious names like Opus One, Robert Mondavi, Beringer, Silver Oak, Stag’s Leap, Caymus, Ferrari-Carano, Kendall Jackson, and Simi among many. The huge gap in between the cheap generic and the expensive AVA wines is where the Australian and Chilean wines thrive in the local market.
Sherwin Lao is the first Filipino wine writer member of both the Bordeaux based Federation Internationale des Journalists et Ecrivains du Vin et des Spiritueux (FIJEV) and the UKbased Circle of Wine Writers (CWW). For comments, inquiries, wine event coverage, wine consultancy, and other wine related concerns, e-mail the author at wineprotege@ gmail.com, or check his wine training website https:// thewinetrainingcamp. wordpress.com/services