By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter

Sales of wine surpassed those of soju, the representative local alcoholic beverage, for the first time in the nation's biggest discount store franchises.

The sales of wine amounted to 24.3 billion won ($23.6 million) during the first five months of this year, 200 million won more than soju, E-Mart announced Sunday. The figure accounts for 19.6 percent of its overall alcohol sales, making wine the second best-selling kind next to beer with 37.4 percent.

E-Mart's sales share of wine has more than doubled since 2005, when wine was fifth at the bottom of the list with 9.4 percent. In 2005, only 41 bottles of wine were sold for every 100 bottles of soju.

Wine is the only kind of alcoholic beverage for which sales have been constantly on the rise over the past few years while soju sales have stagnated, the company said.

"This is the outcome of rapidly growing demand for wine of late," an E-mart official said.

"We expect wine to be neck and neck with beer sales sooner or later with this growth."

A recent wine boom in line with the prevailing well-being trend directly led to the rising demand. Its imports have accelerated in accordance with the influx of brands with reasonable prices from countries like Chile, boosted by the free trade agreement with the Latin American country, the retailer said.

Most customers were keen to buy less pricey wines. Labels below 10,000 won ($9.7) sold the best, accounting for 34.1 percent of overall sales, followed by those between 10,000 and 20,000 won with 30.1 percent.

The size of the domestic wine market is estimated to be around 450 billion won. Discount stores take up about 40 percent of the whole wine purchases and the figure is likely to continue to grow, according to the retailer.

The total consumption of wine was 37,700 kiloliters last year, which is equal to 2.03 bottles per person, outnumbering that of whiskey for the first time.

Last year, E-Mart sold around 6.9 trillion won in combined total with its subsidiary Shinsegae Mart, 0.8 trillion won ahead of Homeplus, which is owned by Samsung Tesco, a joint retailer of South Korea's Samsung and British-based retailer Tesco.

hckim@koreatimes.co.kr