Wine Gourd data-blog final post, and my farewell

This is intended to be my final post for this blog. I have had a lot of fun over the past 10 years, from May 2016 (first post) to now (January 2026), which covers 509 posts. I have had 1,479,000 accesses in total, which is an average of 2,900 reads per post, although I have tended to mostly get c.500 readers per post. I think that this is quite respectable, given the relatively restricted topic.

I had my first official taste of wine in 1975 (at age 17) in Australia. According to Anderson & Pinilla (2023), global wine consumption per capita has been going steadily downhill since that year (but not before) — see the first graph below. While I do not feel any personal responsibility for this situation (What did I do?), I do recognize that it is becoming harder and harder to write anything meaningful about the wine industry.

I have therefore now written most of what I can think of to write about the analysis of data in the wine industry, which is what this blog is supposed to be about. So, I figure that I should stop while I am ahead.

This next graph shows the blog page-views through time, up to last year, showing that they have been fairly consistent, or slightly increasing.

The next graph shows the page-views over the past year, showing a big burst in May.

Interestingly, my most popular posts have been:

• Australia‘s biggest wine companies (2019) (23,692 readers)
• Laube versus Suckling (2018) (14,281 readers)
• How large does a winery have to be, to be consistently profitable? (2020) (12,265 readers).

My readers have mostly been from the USA. The other half of the readers have been scattered equally throughout the rest of the world, as shown next.

Anyway, my last piece of wine data (this post) is apparently about the current downhill slide of global wine consumption — with better performances from producers selling more expensive wines, which is the smaller part of the market, and shrinking sales for those selling less than $US30. This is sad, but perhaps not unexpected, given what is currently being written by experts in the wine field (eg. Declining wine consumption in EU forecast to continue; Shadows over northern California; Are things getting better for the wine industry?; 2026: the year to change the narrative about wine; How the world of wine is set to change in 2026; Wine’s moment of truth: it's time to reinvent; Understanding deconsumption). None of this is especially new, of course (eg. Winescape Summer 2025).

Moreover, we have been told that wine writing is having similar problems:

• Why wine writing might die
• The future of wine writing in a changing industry
• How a (very) few number of humans can stay employed as wine writers in the age of AI.

We have also been told that: affordability and value for money will be 2026’s wine watchwords; but these have always been my own personal watchwords for choosing wine. So, select your wines carefully, to make sure that you enjoy every drop.

Curiously, given the global situation, the wine industry in Thailand is currently booming (The fastest growing wine market in the world is not where you expect). Somehow, I find this quite satisfying. Also, given climate change, Sweden and Norway will likely become more prominent viticultural areas (for example: Why the Swedish wine movement is only going to get bigger; or Wines of Norway). This seems quite gratifying, given that I live in Sweden (where we have had more snow this winter than for many years, as shown below).

I may still write the occasional blog post. In the meantime, I will keep my eye on the wine industry, but for the moment from this blog: goodbye, hej då, au revoir, auf wiedersehen, adieu, adiós ...

The anti-social media arrives on the wine-blogging scene!

I have previously been subject to professional plagiarism, as I have described on my other blog:
          Unacknowledged re-use of intellectual property

However, I was not expecting to have my wine blog plagiarized. Sadly, this has now happened, too. There is a Blogspot blog, called "artsforhealthmmu" that, as of today, consists entirely of copies of 19 of my posts from the Wine Gourd, without an iota of reference to me or my blog. Needless to say, I am not going to put a link to that blog here, but you will find it if you search for the name on the web.

It is not immediately obvious what the game is, here. That other blog is well designed, and there is currently no advertising or rogue links that I can find, although that may change. Interestingly, there is a genuine site called the "Arts and health blog" that has almost exactly the same web address as the plagiarizing blog. (The latter has an extra "s" in the address.) So, there are other people who seem to be as much a victim of this situation as I am.

I have submitted a request to Blogger to have the offending blog removed, but that will take some time to implement. I am hoping that this will result in a better resolution than happened the last time I was plagiarized (mentioned above), where the offending (well-known) author had no real excuse or apology, and the (well-known) book publisher metaphorically just shrugged his shoulders. A pox on all of them!

Update 4 Nov.:

Notice from Google:
"In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement notice. We are in the process of disabling access to the content in question"

Introduction

A gourd of red wine and a sheaf of poems —
A bare subsistence, half a loaf, not more —
Supplied us two alone in the free desert:
What Sultan could we envy on his throne?
                                                        —Robert Graves

Calabash Palm Wine Gourd
from Cameroon

The wine world is full of opinions; and the blogsphere is full of opinions. It is therefore not unexpected that there are countless blogs offering opinions about wine. Some of these opinions are interesting, and some are informative.

However, behind these opinions is a world of information, showing how the world actually is, rather than how we perceive it. Sometimes these data are hidden and sometimes they are in full view. Either way, I figure that we could do worse than have a look them.

As a scientist, I am interested in exploring the data, rather than reading opinions about it. Data are often fascinating, sometimes they are controversial, and not infrequently they challenge received opinion.

So, in the interests of doing something different to everyone else, this blog will delve into the world of wine data. My intention is to ferret out some of the interesting stuff, and to bring it out into the light, for everyone to see. In particular, I have noted that many (if not most) research studies about wine do not show us an actual picture of their data. So, I would like to do this, rather than provide some theoretical assessment of those data.

At heart, I guess that I want to compare the opinions that people hold to the underlying data (the "facts", as the media naïvely like to put it). Naturally, there will also be opinions of my own along the way. However, I am hoping that the primary interest will be in the information itself, and the use of exploratory data analysis to look at it.

The source for the name of the blog will be obvious to anyone who knows how to say "vineyard" in Swedish.