By Patrick Book

Sparkling wine sales booming ahead of New Year’s Eve

Dec 31, 2013 | 4:35 PM

Expect to see a rush on sparkling wines at your local Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority retail store today.

Champagne and other types of bubbly make up a big part of December liquor sales at SLGA shops. David Morris, SLGA's notes that there's a big push on sparkling wine this time of year.

“December is the big month for those products. A full 25 per cent of all of the sparkling wine that we sell during the year is sold in December,” he explained, noting that there was $3.3 million worth of sparkling wines sold in Saskatchewan in 2012.

“It's the beverage that goes with this time of year,” he said. “If you look at all of our products it's probably the product that's most trendy, or season-specific, kind of thing.”

Saskatchewan's sparkling wine consumption is dwarfed by the rest of Canada, however. Statistics Canada data for 2012 shows the entire country spent $366.9 million last year, an increase of nearly eight per cent. That amounts to nearly 22 million litres of product consumed, compared to Saskatchewan's 195,000 litres. On a per capita basis that means Canadians spend more than $10.50 per year on sparkling wine where Saskatchewan specifically spends just over three dollars per person.

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Morris notes that December is the busiest time of the year for alcohol sales in general, not just for sparkling wine.

“The holiday season in general is SLGA's busiest time of the year. We have a lot of our customers coming in to buy their regular beverage alcohol products-beer, wine, and spirits-but then you get a lot of extra purchases as people are buying gifts or gift cards for friends. Maybe they're buying some extra product to do some holiday entertaining and that sort of thing.”

That's borne out in the numbers: the two days before Christmas saw SLGA's 79 stores around Saskatchewan hit $7.3 million in sales on partially-reduced hours. Morris says the volume of products is so great SLGA has to carefully coordinate when and how much product comes into its central warehouse in Regina and ships out to those stores.

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