Need to know how other exporting countries are doing in your growth

markets abroad? Or how wine is competing in the market for alcoholic

beverages? Or which countries are most rapidly upgrading the quality of

their wine imports? Th ese and a thousand other such questions can now be

readily answered with the help of this new statistical compendium. Among

other things, the Compendium exposes the extent to which the worldís

various wine markets are structurally adjusting. Until 15 years ago, wine

exporting was an almost exclusively European activity. In the decade to

1985, for example, about 80 per cent of exports came from fi ve European

Union members (France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Portugal), another 10

per cent came from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, and a further 8 per

cent came from other European countries and the former French colonies

of North Africa. Since then, however, California and several southern

hemisphere countries (Australia, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, and New

Zealand) have begun to challenge that European dominance. Between

1986 and 1999, this new groupís combined share of world wine exports

grew from 1.6 to 15 per cent in value terms.

Simultaneously, per capita consumption in many traditional wineconsuming

countries is declining as consumers switch from quantity to

quality, while consumption in emerging markets in Europe and East Asia is

growing rapidly from a low base. As well, two-way trade is becoming more

common as consumers seek a greater range of styles and varieties of wine.

Globalization also is aff ecting ownership of major wine fi rms, as mergers

and acquisitions spill over national borders.

With these major changes, and with a new round of WTO-sponsored

multilateral trade negotiations (the Doha Development Agenda) getting

under way, there is a greater need than ever for systematic analysis of the

worldís markets for wine. An essential prerequisite for such analysis is a

thorough understanding of past trends and recent developments. To that

end this statistical compendium brings together data from a wide range of

national and international sources and summarizes them in ways that make

it easy to see trends over time and draw comparisons across countries.