Which countries consume the most premium wine?

Most of the wine sold on this planet fits into either the Low-price or the Value categories, which cost less than $10 or €10 per bottle. At the other end are the Premium, Super-premium, Ultra-premium and Prestige categories (for alternative category names see the post How many wine prices are there?). The latter wines are often grouped as "Premium-plus", which group exceeds $20 or €20 per bottle.

This combined group is the topic of this post. Which wine-drinking countries seem to preferentially consume premium-plus wines? The answer may surprise you.

The information comes from The International Spirit and Wine Record. The graph below shows the data for those 78 countries where estimated wine consumption exceeded 1 million 9-L cases (a dozen bottles) for the year 2017. The vertical bars show us the estimated number of premium-plus wine cases as a percentage of the total number of cases of wine. [Note: only every second country is labeled.]

Globally, premium-plus wine consumption comprises only 13% of the wine market. However, there are two countries where premium wine sales exceed 50% (Ireland and Hong Kong), and 6 countries where sales exceed 33%.

Most of the top 15 countries do not produce much wine of their own, and thus are importing the premium wines, except for New Zealand and Australia. These are the countries where 2017 premium-plus sales exceeded 20% of the wine market:

Ireland Hong Kong New Zealand Canada Australia Singapore Switzerland Denmark Norway Japan Costa Rica Puerto Rico Israel Malaysia Taiwan United States of America United Kingdom Thailand

66.9% 50.5% 47.1% 37.2% 36.7% 36.5% 30.4% 30.3% 29.0% 29.0% 27.9% 26.9% 25.5% 24.1% 23.8% 22.6% 22.3% 21.9%

What on earth are those Irish doing!? They are well known for being connoisseurs of Guinness beer and Irish whiskey, but apparently when they drink wine they overwhelmingly prefer fine wine, as well. Who would have thought it?

It is pleasing to see the Australians and New Zealanders setting the standard for the wine-producing countries. There is probably an expectation that local wine consumption in many regions will preferentially be for simple table wines; but the Australians and New Zealanders do not follow this European-inspired approach, but follow much more the approach of the wine-importing cultures, with a much more marked preference for finer wines.

I have noted before that The USA imports more expensive wines than anywhere else, both by volume and by value. This is because of the large population size, which generates large wine importation. Obviously, the U.S.A. drops down the list when adjusted for population size (as shown above).

There are a number of other regions with small wine consumption that also have notable preferences for premium-plus wines, including: Bermuda (70.5% premium), the Cayman Islands (58.6%), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (52.2%), Grenada (45.1%), and the U.S. Virgin Islands (43.4%) (but not so much the British Virgin Islands, 24.6%).

The countries at the bottom of the list include some well-known wine-producing and wine-consuming countries, notably: Germany (2.7% premium), Portugal (2.2%), Romania (1.7%), and South Africa (1.1%). Compare these figures with those for the biggest wine producers: Italy (9.6%), France (7.8%), and Spain (6.7%), where simple table wines comprise most of the wine consumption.

Sadly, I must note the poor performance of Sweden (11.6% premium), compared to the data for their Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark (30%) and Norway (29%), and even Finland (14.9%). I do my best to drink only fine wines, but it is obviously not enough!