Best Demand Forecasting Software for Bordeaux Wine Exporters

Who this is for: châteaux, négociants and cooperatives in Bordeaux managing export sales to the US, the UK, Europe and Asia.

What the numbers say

Bordeaux has lost export volume two years running. FEVS figures put the 2024 fall at 4.5%, to 16.6 million cases, and the 2025 fall at 8.9% in volume and 4.8% in value, at a time when Burgundy grew and French wine exports overall fell 4.1% in value.

The first quarter of 2026 shows where the pressure sits. Nomisma Wine Monitor data put red Bordeaux PDO exports down 19% in value on 8% lower volume, an average price fall of about 12%. White Bordeaux export volume rose 16%. The region is not declining evenly. Its reds are losing price and volume while its whites grow.

The United States makes the picture harder to read. It is France's largest wine export market, and French wine exports there fell 19% in value in 2025, to €1.9 billion, as duties rose and the dollar weakened.

Why Bordeaux forecasting is structurally hard

Distance from the consumer. A classified growth may ship through a négociant to a US importer, then a distributor, then a restaurant or retailer. That is four tiers between the château and the person who drinks the wine, and the château usually sees only the négociant's order. By the time a slowdown in Chicago reaches the château's order book, the importer has already cut its next purchase.

En primeur. Châteaux sell part of each vintage as futures well before bottling, and négociants buy on the strength of their own book-building. The first demand signal for a vintage is therefore speculative buying from a year or more earlier, not current drinking.

A split portfolio. The same house may sell a €12 Bordeaux Supérieur, a white Graves and a classified growth. They respond to price, duty and fashion in different ways, and the 2026 split between red and white makes a single forecast line more misleading than ever.

Duty changes. The US duty on French wine moved four times between April 2025 and July 2026: a 10% surcharge from April 2025, an all-inclusive 15% from August, a temporary 10% under Section 122 after the Supreme Court ruled against the 2025 tariffs in February 2026, and since 24 July 2026 a Section 301 duty set so the combined rate on most EU wine is 10%. Across 2025 the effective duty on French wine came to 7.4% of import value, because containers entered under different regimes. Importers pulled orders forward before each rise and paused afterwards, which left spikes and gaps in the shipment history that have nothing to do with consumers.

If you want to test your own export history against these shifts, book a 30-minute conversation through the Vintaflow contact page.

Supply is tightening too

France's Ministry of Agriculture expects 2026 production of almost 34 million hectolitres, 6% below 2025 and 17% below the 2021 to 2025 average, after an extreme summer. For Bordeaux that means less room to correct an over-committed market from surplus, at the same time as demand for reds is falling. Allocation, not volume, becomes the decision that matters, and it has to be made per market and per colour.

What a good Bordeaux forecast looks like

• Red and white separated, and within each, the price tiers that behave differently.
• Market by market, because the US, the UK, Belgium, Germany and China are moving at different speeds and under different duty regimes.
• Built on depletions where possible. Importer and distributor sell-through shows the consumer response months before the next négociant order.
• Duty flagged in the history. Periods around each duty change are marked so pull-forward orders are not read as demand.
• En primeur visible alongside current demand, so allocation for the next campaign is set against what the last one actually sold through.

A worked example

Consider a négociant shipping a red Bordeaux Supérieur and a white Entre-Deux-Mers to a US importer. In the first half of 2025, ahead of the August duty increase, the importer doubled its usual order of the red. In the second half it bought almost nothing. A forecast that averages the year sees steady demand for the red and plans to repeat it.

The importer's depletions tell a different story. Sell-through of the red has fallen by about a tenth, in line with the wider red Bordeaux trend, and the importer is still carrying stock from the early-2025 order. The white, which it ordered steadily, is depleting faster than it is being replaced.

The right plan for the next season is the opposite of the averaged one: a smaller, later order for the red once the importer's stock has come down, and more of the white, shipped earlier. None of that is visible in the négociant's own shipment history. It only appears when shipments and depletions are read side by side, per wine and per importer.

What to look for in software

• Forecasts built from seasonality, trends and historical performance at the level of wine, market and channel.
• Dashboards that show inventory and sales performance by account and partner, so sell-through can be compared across importers.
• A starting point that uses the spreadsheets and reports you already hold, without an ERP replacement.
• A clear boundary: the software uses your duty, pricing and en primeur figures; it should not claim to calculate them.

Where Vintaflow fits

Vintaflow forecasts demand using seasonality, trends and historical performance, provides account-level performance and inventory dashboards, and reports supplier and customer inventory and sales performance. For a Bordeaux exporter, that means one view of how each wine is selling through each importer and market, which is the input allocation decisions have been missing.

Vintaflow does not model futures contracts, calculate duty or set prices. Those remain in your commercial and finance systems, and you decide how they shape allocation. For the wider 2026 context, see the biggest wine supply chain challenges this year, and for how duty flows into ordering, how wine tariffs affect supply chain planning. Burgundy exporters face a related but different picture, covered in our guide for Burgundy négociants.

A practical starting sequence

1. Split the export history into red and white, then by market. The 2026 divergence will be visible within an hour.
2. Mark every duty change in the US series from April 2025 onward, and treat the weeks around each as unreliable demand.
3. Ask your five largest importers for depletions by wine and channel for the last twelve months.
4. Compare depletion to shipments by importer. Where shipments are well below depletions, stock is being drawn down and a reorder is coming; where they are well above, stock is building.
5. Set next season's allocation from sell-through, not from last year's shipments.
6. Review the forecast monthly for the US and quarterly elsewhere until duty and demand settle, and record why each change was made so the next campaign starts from evidence rather than memory.

To see what your current export data would show in one view, book a conversation with Vintaflow.