The streak has broken. Alicante’s Denomination of Origin Protegida wines have been gradually recovering after the pandemic, but the latest campaign undermined that positive trend. Several factors contribute to the setback: overall consumption has shrunk, and the Chinese market has collapsed due to oversupply. Wineries faced lower expectations for sales and chose to tighten bottling, resulting in about 212,000 fewer units, a drop near 2 percent. This shift is troubling, especially as drought continues to cut harvests.
Bottle counts have long served as a reliable thermometer for the commercial pulse of the wine sector. For Alicante, the all-time high in this metric was reached just before the Covid-19 crisis, when 13 million bottles were bottled. Since then, that peak has not been surpassed.
In 2020, amid lockdowns that kept bars and restaurants closed, local bodegas bottled 10.4 million bottles. A modest, steady rise followed as normal life returned. But the current campaign shows the trend did not last. In 2023, total units stood at 11,743,586, marking a decrease of 211,744 compared with the previous year.
When it comes to the reasons behind this dip, the DOP manager, Eladio Martín Aniorte, cites weaker general demand and the China market setback, driven by overstocking. “China has imposed the hardest virus-related restrictions, leaving large stockpiles and drastically reduced exports,” he notes. The evidence of this shift is clear: what was once the second most important market for Alicante wines, after Germany, has fallen to seventh place.
Miguel Ángel Díaz, commercial director of Bodegas Pinoso, agrees with these assessments and adds that inflation is squeezing consumers across Europe. With wine no longer a necessity, some buyers substitute beer or other lower-alcohol beverages, affecting demand in the region.
Despite the bottled volume slipping, the value of sales has climbed. The last campaign recorded revenue around 31 million, up about 21 percent over two years. Aniorte cautions that those figures can be deceptive when production costs have also risen sharply. In short, higher revenue does not necessarily translate into healthier margins for producers.
The drought and field abandonment have further reduced cultivated hectares by about 10 percent over the past four years. That contraction has translated into lower harvests and a drop in wine production from roughly 177,000 to about 110,000 hectoliters. Yet Aniorte emphasizes that wineries still have room to maneuver. Currently, only half of production is bottled; the rest goes to bulk uses. The aim is to lift bottling levels while maintaining a focus on quality and better pricing.
The sector calls for aid to counter rainfall shortages
The Alicante wine sector is pressing the Regional Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries to establish subsidies to mitigate the drought’s harmful effects. Aniorte points to last year as the worst grape harvest on record, with just 18.8 million kilograms, a 28 percent drop from the previous year. He highlights what he calls a “critical situation” for cooperatives that will worsen with reduced production. The DOP also seeks incentives for planting locally adapted grape varieties and smarter planning to prevent solar projects from encroaching on arable land.