Trends in Twitter wine-related tweets

I recently published a blog post on Long-term trends in Google wine-related searches, which used Google Trends results to analyze wine-related web activity. Another way to quantify this sort of activity is to look at Twitter tweets.

I have no direct means to do this myself, but The great American word mapper has mapped where (in the USA) the top 100,000 words are used the most in Twitter data.

The data for the maps were drawn from billions of tweets collected by geographer Diansheng Guo in 2014. Jack Grieve, a forensic linguist at Aston University in the United Kingdom, along with Andrea Nini of the University of Manchester, identified the top 100,000 words used in these tweets, and how often they are used in every county in the continental United States, based on location data from Twitter.

For example, this first map shows you where the word "Alcohol" has appeared most often in the tweets. In each map, the darkness of the shading is proportional to the frequency of the word use in that location.

There is obviously great variation throughout the USA, which probably tells us something about the sociology of Americans. You might, for example, ask yourself why this particular word is not used in the south-eastern states. The answer may lie in the map for the word "Liquor", shown next.

What I have done for the rest of this post is take a few wine-related words (defined loosely), and used the web page to produced the maps for you. I encourage you to choose any words you like and produce your own maps, using the link above. You could try different wine-growing regions or wine styles, for example. However, you can only search for single words.

Note that for most of the wine words shown below, the words are gathered in cities, which is not true for the other alcoholic beverages. Furthermore, "Wine" and "Beer" are almost exclusive words; as, indeed, are "Syrah" and "Shiraz"!

Last updated: 21 Feb 2017.