Whites Over Reds

Dan Berger
Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

If you're planning to have a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the new year, chances are pretty good that the wine will be either white or pink; the amount of red sparkling wine in this world is so small you may never see one.

Sparkling white wines are a festive way to celebrate New Year's Eve. Whether it's $6 a bottle or an exalted French Champagne at 10 times that, the world loves to celebrate with anything containing bubbles.

Once 2024 is here, however, our wine consumption likely will remain with sparkling wine more than it has in the recent past. Consumers the world over, even if they're not celebrating anything, seem smitten with anything that's sparkling.
Updated: Tue Dec 30, 2025

If you're planning to have a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the new year, chances are pretty good that the wine will be either white or pink; the amount of red sparkling wine in this world is so small you may never see one.

Sparkling white wines are a festive way to celebrate New Year's Eve. Whether it's $6 a bottle or an exalted French Champagne at 10 times that, the world loves to celebrate with anything containing bubbles.

Once 2024 is here, however, our wine consumption likely will remain with sparkling wine more than it has in the recent past. Consumers the world over, even if they're not celebrating anything, seem smitten with anything that's sparkling.

In a recent report, a major European wine agency (International Organization of Vine and Wine, OIV) says that the increased demand for white wines, "particularly in sparkling wine markets like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom," has increased in the last five years.

This has offset declining wine drinking in the last few years in Spain and France.

As a result of increased interest in sparkling wine around this country, a wine company in Healdsburg, California, Rack and Riddle, now specializes in producing high-caliber, sparkling wines for wineries that don't have the proper equipment.

Because of significant demand by wineries nationally, Rack and Riddle recently opened another huge production facility.

That same OIV report also points out that white and rose wines now constitute a greater overall share of the international wine market than do red wines — the first time that has happened in history.

Between 2017 and 2021, worldwide consumption of white wine increased by 42.2% and rose wine sales increased 9.5% with the United States leading the world in consumption of white and pink.

One thing that may be driving part of the increase in white wine sales is that it's much easier to produce lower-alcohol wines with character if it is a white wine. It's more difficult to make decent lower-alcohol reds.

This category of low-alc wine is rapidly growing among those who desire less of an impact. At one point a decade ago, high-alcohol wines, particularly reds, constituted a significant increase in wine sales.

That has declined precipitously in the last three years and wine companies have responded by producing lower-alcohol whites, which also come with the added benefit of having fewer calories.

As for pink and rose wines, sales of these products used to be significant only in the spring and summer months. Now, rose sales are a year-round phenomenon.

Barry Herbst, wine buyer for the huge Bottle Barn store in Santa Rosa, California, for at least a decade has had enormous, floor-stacked and racked displays of pink wines from at least a dozen countries, including hard-to-get items from France, South Africa and a massive selection from California.

Bottle Barn's website indicates that its inventory includes almost 400 different bottlings that have the word "rose" in their name!

Wine of the Week: 2022 Lifevine Rose, California ($15) — Dry pink wines aren't that difficult to find these days, but several of them contain residual sugar. This new brand has the words "zero sugar" on the label, and the aroma and taste are attractive. The package also says it was made from organic grapes. The wine is completely dry and smells like fresh cherries. It has only 113 calories per five-ounce glass.

Dan Berger lives in Sonoma County, California, where he publishes "Vintage Experiences," a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com. To find out more about Dan Berger and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.