At €25 a bottle, Bestheim aims to break the glass ceiling for Crémants d’Alsace

We are determined to break the glass ceiling for Crémant d’Alsace. Few companies are truly willing to take that step”, explains Agostino Panetta, managing director of Bestheim, Alsace’s largest co-operative winery with 300 member growers farming 1,400 hectares and sales of 12 million bottles in 2025.

Panetta places that glass ceiling at between €5 and €8 per bottle and to break it, Bestheim is focusing on lees ageing. “Our entry level wines spend at least 18 months on the lees. Moving upmarket inevitably means more time on the lees”, he says. This strategy has culminated in the co-operative’s release of Solera, a Crémant that has matured for six and a half years on the lees and retails for €25 a bottle. The single varietal Pinot blanc is produced using a fractional blending system which began in 2010. The inaugural release totals just 7,800 bottles, a drop in the ocean compared with Bestheim’s 2025 Crémant production of 7 million bottles.

Its director readily acknowledges that he currently sells his Crémants at an average price of €7 a bottle, with an ambition to reach €15. “The work we are putting into these wines fully justifies the price”, Panetta argues. “And quite frankly, we need to double our sales prices given the level of investment required to produce Crémant: 1 million bottles ageing on the lees ties up around €3.5 million in working capital”.

The Solera label will be officially launched at Wine Paris. To support this bold strategic shift, Bestheim will be leveraging its technical expertise while bolstering its sales team in a bid to penetrate the on-trade and specialist wine retail. Until now, the co-operative has only achieved marginal sales in both channels, with wine stores and restaurants accounting for just 1% of its sales last year.