Does wine production increase wine consumption?

Last week, I had a look at which countries principally consume wine and which consume more beer (Beer countries and wine countries). One could then ask, as did one of my correspondents (Vicky Corbeels), whether bigger wine-producing countries drink more wine than do countries that produce less.

So, let's have another look at the data for 2015, as contained in the Annual Database of Global Wine Markets, compiled by Anderson,  Nelgen and Pinilla. Tables 19 (Volume of wine production per capita) and 23 (Volume of beverage wine consumption per capita) contain the information that we need.

Once again, we need to standardize the data for each country, in order to deal with different population sizes and demographies (ie. we should compare production and consumption per adult). Unfortunately, we have data only per capita, which deals with population size but not with the proportion of people under drinking age.

The result is shown in the first graph, for 29 wine-producing countries. Each point represents one country, located vertically based on liters of wine consumed during 2015 per person, and horizontally based on liters of wine produced per person during 2015. The USA is shown as the red point.

The pink line indicates equality of consumption and production per person — the countries above the line consume more wine than they produce, and those below the line produce more wine than they consume. Note that there are four countries in the dataset that produce and consume very little wine per person (China, Brazil, Tunisia, and Japan).

There are only two countries that consume per person as much wine as they produce — the USA and Greece (they are on the line). There are also two countries that consume slightly more per person than they produce — Romania and Austria (just above the line). In these countries, any exports must be matched by imports, notably for Austria and, especially, the USA. Those 7 million cases of imported Yellow Tail are being counter-balanced by exports!

Otherwise, there are six countries that consume much more wine per person than they produce. The two that produce very little and yet consume a lot (next to the vertical axis of the graph) are the United Kingdom and Belgium-Luxembourg.

There are also seven countries that produce much more wine than they consume per person (at the right of the graph). The two outliers (at the bottom-right of the graph) are Chile and Spain.  As I noted last week, the Spanish consume twice as much beer as wine. According to the World Health Organization, wine consumption in Chile dropped by three-quarters between 1960 and the mid-1990s, and has remained stable since then, at about the same level as beer and spirits.

As expected, the other biggest wine producers are Italy, France and Portugal, which are also well-known wine consuming countries. The sixth and seventh biggest producers, paired together in the graph, are Australia and New Zealand, which consume more wine per person than do Chile and Spain, but less than Italy, France and Portugal.

This leaves us with the question as to whether wine consumption per person does (or does not) increase with wine production. If we exclude the four most extreme countries (Chile and Spain, and the UK and Belgium-Luxembourg), then the answer appears to be: Yes. A logarithmic function fitted to the remaining data (as shown in the second graph, above) indicates that 58% of the increase in consumption is related to increase in production. There really are "wine countries" (but the USA is not really one of them).