French consumers cut back on alcohol, squeezing wine and Champagne producers

French consumers are making sharper trade-offs on everyday spending, and that shift is putting new pressure on wine and Champagne producers as alcohol consumption falls and beer gains ground in the country’s drinking habits.

That was the message from Olivier Dauvers, a consumer expert and specialist in mass retailing, during a conference at the Viti Vini trade show in Epernay, according to remarks published by Matot Braine. Dauvers said the era of automatic consumption growth in France is over and warned producers not to rely on higher prices alone to make up for weaker sales volumes.

“The hard times are here, and they will last,” Dauvers said, describing a consumer market that has largely stalled for years. Before the Covid-19 crisis, French consumption had grown regularly, he said. Since 2008, however, it has moved broadly around zero, leaving companies in a more competitive market where they can no longer count on natural demand growth to lift sales.

Dauvers said household caution is a central reason. Faced with economic, social and geopolitical uncertainty, French consumers are saving more and spending more selectively. He said the savings rate is now close to 20% of disposable income, after reaching 19% in 2025, compared with 14% in 2019.

That caution is changing the way people shop. Dauvers said price has become a decisive factor, but he argued that consumers are still willing to pay more when they believe a higher price is justified. In his view, the real issue is whether producers and brands can clearly show the value behind a product, whether that value comes from quality, origin, know-how or another concrete benefit.

If that difference is not clear, he said, companies risk being pushed into a direct price war. “It’s not only the price, it’s also the value,” he said.

Dauvers also drew a distinction between purchasing power and what he called the “desire to buy.” He said the feeling of not having enough money does not always reflect an actual drop in income. It can also come from the growing gap between what people want to buy and what they can realistically afford. Social media and constant exposure to new goods and lifestyles feed that frustration, he said, creating pressure even when household finances are relatively stable.

That broader shift is especially important for the alcohol market in France. Dauvers said alcohol consumption has been falling steadily and younger generations are moving away from it more sharply. At the same time, competition between beverage categories has intensified, with beer gradually taking market share from wine. He said wine is increasingly associated with wealthier consumers, while lower-income households are cutting back more heavily on purchases.

For wine and Champagne producers, that raises a basic strategic question: how to protect margins without pricing out too many customers. Dauvers warned against trying to compensate for declining volumes through continuous price increases that leave bottles sitting unsold on store shelves. He said a strategy focused only on moving upmarket can become a trap if consumers drift away from the category itself.

Champagne, he said, is not insulated from those pressures despite the strength of its global name. Dauvers pointed to consumption shifting toward other beverages, especially beer, and said sparkling wines as a broader segment have held up better than some other parts of the market, helped in part by prosecco. Even so, he said the Champagne sector cannot rely on image alone and must keep working to maintain consumer demand.

“You can have the best brand in the world, the highest image in the world, it will be useless if there are no longer enough consumers to buy it,” he said.

His comments come at a sensitive time for the French drinks industry, which is weighing how to adjust prices, defend brand positioning and recruit new consumers in a market where volume growth is no longer doing the work it once did. For wine, beer, spirits and other beverage makers, the pressure is likely to increase if households continue to favor affordability and simpler drinking occasions.

Dauvers said the challenge is not to abandon premium strategies, but to connect them to real consumer expectations. That means preserving the value of Champagne and wine while also widening occasions for consumption and making products easier to understand and access.

He also said supermarkets cannot solve that problem on their own. Retailers, in his view, mainly respond to demand and give shelf space to products consumers are ready to buy. They may favor higher-revenue items, but they cannot keep pushing products that do not attract enough customers, especially in already crowded aisles. “At best, the distributor is a passer,” he said, meaning an intermediary rather than the driver of long-term value.

That leaves producers and brands with a larger share of the work. Dauvers said they must explain their difference more clearly and build trust with consumers. As an example, he pointed to the French dairy cooperative brand C’est qui le patron?, whose customers accept paying more for milk because they understand that the higher price supports fairer pay for farmers.

His broader argument was that value cannot simply be declared. It has to be built, shown and understood. In a constrained market, he said, success depends on making products desirable, understandable and accessible at the same time.

Addressing Champagne professionals, Dauvers said the burden of adaptation falls on companies, not on consumers. “It is not the consumer who adapts to the period. It is you who will adapt with your consumers,” he said.