Spain has outstripped France and Italy to become the world’s biggest wine exporter, exporting 22.8m hectolitres in 2014, a 22% rise on the previous year.

However, because much of it was bulk sales with small margins, the Spanish wine industry’s profits were down2.2%.

France is now the biggest buyer of Spanish wines, importing and bottling – often as French wine – 5.8m hectolitres in 2014,40% more than the previous year. A hectolitre is equivalent of 133.3 bottles.

It is cheaper for the French to import the wine than to grow it themselves. The next biggest buyers after France were Germany, Portugal and Russia.



The situation mirrors in many respects the Spain’s olive oil industry. About 40% of Spanish production is exported in bulk to Italy, where it is rebottled and sold as estate bottled Italian olive oil.



Selling wine in bulk is easy and cheap, but the margins are small and it perpetuates the image of Spain as a purveyor of plonk, whereas several regions produce wine that is among the best in the world.



As with olive oil, it’s a problem of marketing and perception. Most good Spanish wine is little known outside Spain or even the region where it is produced.

Gerard Ventura, of the Jané Ventura bodega just south of Barcelona, says it is easier to find his wine in Berlin than in Barcelona where people continue to buy rioja even though Catalonia produces some of the finest reds in Europe.



Rioja is practically the only wine region that non-Spaniards are familiar with although, like bordeaux, it suffers from over-production. Wine from the northern regions of Ribera del Duero and Navarra is less widely known largely because the bodegas (wineries) do little to market their wines outside Spain.

Shortly after the second world warthe Torres winery began producing branded wines in order to circumvent the stifling rules governing denominación de orígen and to put a stop to bulk sales Torres, which is best known for Viña Sol wine,posted a sales rise of 5% to €240m for 2014, of which 70% was from exported bottled, not bulk, wine.

Miguel Torres, the managing director, says the future lies in higher quality and also organic wines, as the cheap and mid-range markets are already saturated.

