Demand Forecasting for Burgundy Négociants

Who this is for: négociants managing a multi-domaine allocation book across export markets, deciding placement before the campaign is committed.

The headline number for Bourgogne in 2025 looks reassuring. Over the first eight months, exports grew 4.3% in volume against the same period in 2024. The number underneath it does not: value grew only 1.2%.

That gap is the entire planning problem. More bottles left Bourgogne for less money, and the averages conceal markets moving in opposite directions hard enough to invert a placement decision.

The year did not happen at one speed

The first quarter of 2025 set a fifteen-year record, with 22 million bottles exported. Then it decelerated. Between the first quarter and the cumulative eight-month figure, volume growth halved from 8.8% to 4.3%, and value growth fell sixfold, from 7.8% to 1.2%. Over the June to August window specifically, exports fell 0.4% in volume and 6.2% in value against the same months in 2024.

A négociant forecasting off the annual trend would have read a good year. A négociant forecasting off rolling three-month customs data would have seen the turn in time to hold back allocation.

This is the case for shortening the reporting cadence before it is the case for buying anything. If your view of market performance updates once a campaign, the view will be wrong for most of the campaign.

The market split is severe enough to invert decisions

Look at the top markets over the first eight months of 2025:

• United States: volume down 1.5%, value down 4.1%
• United Kingdom: volume up 2.3%, value down 10.6%
• Canada: volume up 25.3%, value up 26.5%
• Japan: volume down 2.1%, value up 5.7%

Four markets, four different problems. The UK is the one worth pausing on: volume grew while value fell more than a tenth. That is not a demand problem, it is a mix and pricing problem, and shipping more bottles into it makes the value line worse rather than better. A volume-based forecast would read UK growth as a reason to allocate more.

Japan is the mirror image. Volume fell slightly, value rose 5.7%, and Japan dropped out of the top five by volume while remaining highly valuable per bottle. Reading Japan on volume alone would suggest retreat from a market that improved on the metric that pays.

Canada is the clearest opportunity in the book, up roughly a quarter on both measures, helped by several provinces restricting US wines. But note the shape: Canada was 8.4% of export volume in 2024 against only 4.8% of value, so the demand skews toward accessible appellations. The instruction is not "send more Burgundy to Canada". It is "send more of a specific part of the range".

What the US tariffs actually did

The cumulative US figure, down 1.5% in volume over eight months, is misleading in a way that matters for anyone holding allocation against a US importer.

Between February and August 2025, through the negotiation period, monthly exports to the US swung between −11% and +19%. Once the new tariffs applied, volumes fell 21% in July and 22% in August against the same months in 2024. The cumulative number is an average across a period that includes a strong pre-tariff run and a sharp post-tariff drop.

With the US at 22.1% of Bourgogne export volume and 22.4% of value in 2024, roughly a fifth of the book took a step change partway through the year. Any allocation committed on pre-tariff sell-through assumptions is now sitting against a different demand curve, and the négociant carries that until it clears.

To work through how your own market-level sell-through would read against this, book a 30-minute conversation and bring one importer's stock and depletion reports.

Supply is aligned; placement is the decision

The 2025 harvest is estimated at 1.43 million hectolitres, or a little over 190 million bottles. That is better than the constrained 2024 vintage of just over 1.2 million hectolitres, but still below the ten-year average of around 1.48 million.

Stock tells the more useful story. Estate stocks fell 14.8% year on year to July 2025 yet remain 5.9% above the five-year average, and once négociant holdings are included the 2025 to 2026 campaign opened 7% above the five-year benchmark. Supply is therefore broadly matched to a market that is softening.

That changes the nature of the question. In a short vintage the problem is rationing. With supply roughly aligned to demand, the problem becomes placement: which market, which appellation tier, at which moment. Getting that wrong no longer shows up as a shortage. It shows up as stock sitting in the wrong country at the wrong price.

The transaction data points the same way. Over the 2024 to 2025 campaign, bulk transactions between operators totalled 730,000 hectolitres, with only 77% relating to the 2024 vintage, the lowest such rate in fifteen years, and the opening of the 2025 to 2026 campaign has already shown a 20% decline in the first two months.

What a forecast has to produce

For a négociant, three outputs justify the exercise:

Sell-through velocity per market, appellation and vintage. Not a global rate. The 2025 data shows the same house can be growing in Canada, holding volume in the UK while losing value, and falling sharply in the US, all in the same quarter.

Volume and value read together. Every conclusion above depends on holding both. A forecast that projects cases and ignores realised price would have recommended more UK allocation and less Japanese.

Forward cover per importer. Which importers will run short and which are accumulating, early enough that stock can be rebalanced between markets rather than discounted at the end of the campaign.

Two appellation groups are worth watching as leading indicators, because both grew volume well ahead of value over the first eight months of 2025. Bourgogne and Bourgogne plus a geographic denomination whites rose 7.2% in volume against 5.0% in value, and Mâcon whites rose 10.5% in volume against just 2.6% in value. The BIVB reads that as price repositioning to hold market share. For a négociant it is a warning about where discounting is already happening in the range, and it argues for tracking realised value per bottle by appellation rather than assuming the tier holds its price.

Crémant de Bourgogne is the counter-example, growing 10.6% in volume and 11.7% in value over the same period, with volume and revenue both more than doubling over the past decade. It is the one part of the range where growth is not being bought with price.

Where Vintaflow fits

Vintaflow forecasts demand using seasonality, trends and historical sales performance that the négociant supplies as xlsx or csv, which for most houses means the importer stock and depletion reports already arriving as spreadsheets. It provides account-level performance and inventory dashboards, so sell-through can be read per market, appellation and vintage rather than as a single global figure, and it manages producer, importer, distributor and retailer stages from one hub with lead times, capacity constraints and minimum order quantities accounted for.

Where importers participate, selected inventory and sales performance can be shared between partners, which is how a négociant and an importer stop reconciling two different views of the same stock.

The limits are worth stating plainly, because the previous version of this page overstated them. Vintaflow does not model en primeur or futures commitments as a distinct instrument. It does not calculate duty, tariff or currency impact. It does not receive automatic feeds from importer systems. Those figures come from your commercial and finance systems, and Vintaflow works from the resulting positions.

If you want to talk through how your current importer reporting would translate into per-market cover, contact Vintaflow with a description of your market split and reporting cadence.