Ergo, we poll bars on the subject and have been for the best part of a decade. This year, 90% of bars said they stocked one brand, two-thirds had two, while more than half had three or more at their disposal. Not bad for a sub-category of sparkling. The league has seen a duopoly since its debut – Moët Hennessy’s Moët & Chandon (which is a third-owned by Diageo) and Pernod Ricard’s Perrier-Jouët duking it out for house pour in the way rum, gin or vodka brands might. The world’s most voluminous champagne, Moët has five wins in our list, with PerrierJouët on four, so you can imagine the surprise when Veuve Clicquot stole in for the win this year.
The distinctive yellow-labelled Moët Hennessy-owned champagne was joint most-likely to be the house pour (in 12% of cases) and was among bars’ top-three in 26%. Veuve clearly backs up its volume with cool appeal – it’s top of the trending pops this year. Its stablemate, Moët dropped to second. It was the house champagne in one in 10 bars polled, but part of the three most used in 22%.
Up next was another big mover – Billecart-Salmon, normally mid-table, has jumped to third. The family-owned, medium-sized house has always punched above its weight in the on-trade and this year was the joint highest on house pour (26%). In terms of its likelihood to be part of the inventory, it was found in 19% of bars. It was also second on Trending.
So then to Perrier-Jouët, so often the winner or runner-up. Well it was very tight from first to fourth, with the Pernod brand taking 11% of house pours and found to be a top-three champagne in 19%. That leaves us with six brands, four of which were in the list last year: Ruinart, Dom Perignon, Krug and Bollinger remained and Mumm and Taittinger returned. These brands were found to be among the top-three serves in bars but rarely where the action is found – the fight for the house pours.
Methodology
The results of this report are the culmination of a questionnaire of 106 bars around the world, each cherry-picked to take part based on their performance in global bar awards. We aim to find out not only which brands sell best but also what’s trending. These two data sets give us an insight into the brands that are doing the most volume and the brands that are hot right now.
To read more on the methodology of the Brands Report click here.
