Recent wine power brands

In my last post (Why have spirits brands been "more powerful" in the marketplace than wine brands?) I discussed a few wine brands that have consistently done well in the marketplace, in terms of dominating their segments. However, the data finished in 2015, which is hardly recent. So, now we should look at some more recent information.

For each of the past 3 years, Wine Intelligence has produced what they call the Global Wine Brand Power Index, assessing the worldwide performance of various wine brands. This lists the top 15 of “the world’s strongest wine brands from a consumer point of view” (ie. based on consumer feeedback).

They describe their effort this way (Power brands: the back-story):

Over the past 15 years, the team here at Wine Intelligence has closely monitored the performance of a number of wine brands across the 32 markets that we cover in terms of wine consumer usage and attitude ... The Global Wine Brand Power Index is the result of on an algorithm developed by Wine Intelligence using data from our wholly-owned Vinitrac® surveys of respondents in key wine markets. As well as measuring the consumer’s consumption behaviour and attitude towards wine, the surveys also determine the health of a brand by asking respondents the following questions:

• Which brands they have heard of from a list of 40 to 60 brands (we tailor each brand list for each market)
• Which they have purchased in the past 3 months
• Which they would consider purchasing
• Which they feel an affinity towards.

An index is then calculated at a global level as well as at a country level.

The size of the surveys differed across the 3 years. For example, the first survey (2018 report, based on the 2017 survey) covered c.16,000 respondents in 15 wine markets, including Australia, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the USA. The other two surveys expanded these numbers to c.20,000 respondents in 20 (2019 report) and 21 (2020 report) wine market mix, while also changing the markets (eg. for 2020: Chile, Denmark and Switzerland were removed, and Colombia, Finland, Hong Kong and Mexico were added).

I have compiled the data for the Global Index from the press releases, and combined them. Here is a set of plots of the rankings from the three lists. Each point represents one wine brand, showing its rank in the lists. There are three pairwise comparisons, each of them shown twice. For example, the middle-left graph has the 2018 ranks horizontally and the 2019 ranks vertically, while the middle-top graph has the same information the other way around.

The most interesting thing to note here is that the 2018 and 2019 lists are very similar in order, in spite of the expanded scope of the second survey. However, the 2020 list is somewhat different from both of these — clearly, there was some movement of wine brands near the middle of the list. We can look at this in more detail by looking at the actual Power Scores, rather than just the rank-order list. I have the data only for the 2019 and 2020 reports, which are shown in the next graph (each point represents one wine brand).

This shows us that six of the top brands had similar scores in both years, as did the four bottom brands. However, the other five brands notably changed scores, which severely affected their ranking in the list.

We should now look at the actual brands that did well across all 3 years. This table lists those 14 wine brands that appeared in all of the years, in their average rank order. Note that four of these brands have very similar ranks (8.0–8.7); and it is these that changed rank between years. The two brands that appeared only in some of the lists are Torres (2019, 2020) and Woodbridge (2018).

1.0 2.0 4.2 4.8 6.2 8.0 8.3 8.7 8.7 9.7 10.2 11.3 12.3 13.8

Yellow Tail Casillero del Diablo Gallo Family Vineyards Jacob’s Creek Mouton Cadet J.P. Chenet Gato Negro Carlo Rossi Robert Mondavi Barefoot Beringer Frontera Lindeman’s Santa Carolina

Only the top two brands maintained their position across all 3 years, and these may therefore be considered to be the most powerful (or strongest) wine brands in the world.

You will note that this list is dominated by brands from Australia and Chile, in spite of the fact that these two countries account for less than 10% of world wine production. Marketplace power is not the same thing as volume of sales.