When life gives you lemons: Bottega pegs lemon spritz for growth after topping sparkling wine market

17-Jul-2024 - Last updated on 17-Jul-2024 at 00:00 GMT

Bottega believes it has found its next major avenue of business growth in the lemon spritz category. ©Bottega

Prosecco heavyweight Bottega believes it has found its next major avenue of business growth in the lemon spritz category, claiming it is witness immense demand in APAC.

When we last spoke to the firm in 2023, Bottega Export Manager Airlines Valentina Dalle Mule had described plans to overtake champagne in the sparkling wine category given prosecco’s cost and convenience advantages – and this year, it appears that Bottega has succeeded in reaching its goal within the highly-coveted travel retail market.

“We managed to reach first place in the world within the travel retail category as per the IWSR rankings this year, for the Champagne and sparkling wine category - a big achievement especially in travel retail as this covers many important occasions where consumers look for premium consumption, such as first or business class airplane travel,” Dalle Mule told FoodNavigator-Asia at the recent Tax Free World Association (TFWA) APAC event in Singapore.

“On the back of this success, we are also looking for more avenues of growth and in our market research we realised that the Lemon Spritz product which we launched last year – a combination of our Limoncino, spritz and mint - has been booming worldwide, a trend led strongly by the APAC region.

“As such, we believe there is a strong opportunity to work on here and will expand the range to also include a zero-alcohol version using our Limoncino 0.0 to appeal to consumers that like refreshing drinks but can’t drink alcohol for any reason.

“One of the unique selling points of our Limoncino is the use of the Femminello lemon, which is known for its fine-grained peel and high-quality essential oils. We have also developed another form of Limoncino using lemons grown in Sorrento.”

Notably, Sorrento lemons have obtained Geographic Indication (GI) protection due to their rarity of only being able to be found in this region, where the GI states that these lemons have a distinct flavour, thickness of peel and aroma that cannot be completely replicated elsewhere.

“We have other types of fruit liquors made with melon or pineapple or pear and more, but lemoncino has seen very high popularity especially in Asia so definitely is an area we will look into more,” she added.

“This could be due to the hot weather in this region too, as limoncello and by derivation lemon spritz is both refreshing and sweet, which is a combination that holds great appeal for consumers here.”

Different demands across generations

That said, she highlighted that zero-alcohol or lower-alcohol products are more in-demand by younger consumers so the trend is likely to continue to grow, but at the same time the company is keen to ensure that its reach will cover both new and old consumers.

“Definitely the big growth potential is with lemon spritz, but at the same time we are aware that many of our older consumers are still keen on alcoholic products that are stronger and just more classic beverages, whether these are whiskeys or wines and so on,” she said.

“So we are also looking at whiskey as a strong category here in Asia and developing a special whiskey project catering to this as well, where we are working in our special distillery where we make our grappas to now make what is the first single-malt Italian whiskey, which we hope to launch later this year.

“We believe the trends are strong for this, and with both lower and higher alcohol categories covered, we also are confident in being able to cater to all the different consumer demographics with a wide variety of products.”