After the shock of the first two weeks, the French wanted good bottles and cocktails, which boosted sales of gin (+ 14%) and rum (+ 7.5%) in April. But that was not enough to reverse the market trend. The winegrowers had to resolve to distill hundreds of thousands of liters of wine in need of buyers and the spirits companies deplore a “Accelerating market degradation”.
More than confinement, the French Federation of Spirits (FFS) points to the effects of the Egalim law on sales. These had already fallen by 3.5% in 2019 in mass distribution, according to Nielsen. “We lost 1.3 million nine-liter cases in twelve months, mainly anise and whiskey”, deplores the president of the FFS, Michel Gayraud.
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