The cost of wine consumed differs greatly between countries

A couple of weeks ago I looked at the relationship between wine consumption and wine production (Does wine production increase wine consumption?). Another interesting relationship is between wine consumption and wine value, which I will delve into here.

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 238 (Expenditure per capita on wine) and 23 (Volume of beverage wine consumption per capita) contain the information that we need. Per capita expenditure on wine varies quite dramatically between countries, as recently shown on the AAWE Facebook page:

As before, we need to standardize the data for each country, in order to deal with different population sizes and demographies (ie. we should compare expenditure 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 next graph, for 49 wine-consuming countries. Each point represents one country, located vertically based on the amount of money (in $US) spent on wine during 2015 per person, and horizontally based on liters of wine consumed per person during 2015. The USA is shown as the red point.

The data show that there is a reasonably strong relationship between consumption and expenditure — the more that is consumed per person then the more money is spent per person. However, the increase in consumption accounts for only 64% of the variation in expenditure — some countries definitely drink cheap wine and some drink more expensive wine! It is the between-country variation that is of interest.

The main pink line (on the graph) indicates an average expenditure of c. $10 per liter per person (ie. $7.50 per standard bottle). The countries above the line spend more than this on average, and those below the line spend less. For reference, the upper dashed line represents $12 per liter per person, while the lower one is $8 per liter per person.

For example, the data show that France, Greece, Australia and the USA consume very different amounts of wine per person, but the people spend roughly the same amount of money per bottle, on average ($11-12 per liter). Similarly, Belgium-Luxembourg, Germany and the Netherlands also consume very different amounts of wine per person, but these people still spend roughly the same amount of money per bottle, on average ($8-9 per liter).

On the other hand, Croatia and Portugal consume more wine per person than do any of the other countries (they are at the right-hand side of the graph), and they both spend roughly the same amount per bottle as each other ($6 per liter). The three countries at the top of the graph (Switzerland, Denmark and Austria) also consume roughly the same amount of wine per person as each other, but they spend far more per bottle than does anyone else ($19, $17 and $16 per liter, respectively) — these people have more money than sense, apparently.

At the other extreme, Romania is on its own at the bottom of the graph, spending less per person than any other country where wine is popular ($1.50 per liter). The Ukraine consumes much less wine per person, but spends only slightly more ($2 per liter).

Finally, I will point out who appear to be the real silver-tails. Neither Japan nor Singapore are big wine-consuming countries, but when they drink wine they do spend a lot on it, $45 per liter per person and $38 per liter per person, respectively. These high prices can't all be taxes, although (like Switzerland and Denmark) most wine is imported, and thus possibly more expensive. Business gift-giving is likely to be involved, here.

Re-use is not often a part of the three Rs

In the modern world, most people should be familiar with the Three-R environmental creed: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This management idea has a lot to do with sustainability, which is the 21st century approach to living in our world.

The Three-Rs are specified in their order of priority. That is, we should pro-actively reduce the usage of non-essentials, such as packaging. For the rest, we should preferably re-use or re-purpose used materials. For any remainder, we should retro-actively recycle it. Nothing should be going into rubbish land-fills, which was the fate of most unused products in my youth.

This approach to waste management is such an important creed that many governments have made it compulsory. For example, there are 35 Chapters (known as the "acquis") that need negotiating in order for a country to join the European Union, with Environment being Chapter 27. Anyone who compares an applicant country to the EU (eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina) with a member country (eg. neighboring Croatia) cannot but notice the difference in roadside rubbish. This will change soon for Bosnia and Herzegovina, I presume.

The wine industry does care about this creed, of course, and we are constantly being told about new initiatives. However, it seems to me that most of these reports are aimed at Reduce and Recycle, rather than Re-use.

Wine industry

In terms of Reduce, most of the initiatives are incorporated into what it now called "organic agriculture" (in our case, both viticulture and wine production). This includes reducing use of things like water, non-renewable energy, pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified organisms, bottle weight, and also reducing the production of carbon emissions.

In term of Recycle, in the vineyard this involves recycling things like the vine prunings, and also the marc (or pomace) from the winery — recycled as fertilizer, or converted to biofuels (Innovative solid biofuel production from grape marc through hydrothermal carbonization), or even flavor enhancers (This Penticton company is crushing wine-making’s sustainability goals). In the wine production part, it is the packaging we are usually referring to (not usually the wine itself), notably bottles, but also considering the use of cans, and bag-in-box packaging. Even corks are being recycled (Nike unveils sustainable sneaker line featuring recycled cork from wine industry).

For Re-use, it is also the packaging that is often important (not the wine!). This issue also arises in other industries such as gardening, where the use of plastic pots is normal. What happens to those millions of pots are the purchaser plants the plant?

Where I currently live, the answer to that question is that in small quantities they can go into the "plastic packaging" part of the recycling system, which is melted and used to form new plastic. However, more commonly the pots go into the "burnable" part of the system. The environmentally friendly fate of this is explained at the foot of the post. However, back when I lived in Australia there was a garden center near my house that would accept used pots from customers. The owner would clean them, and then re-use them for their original purpose. Re-use precedes Recycle.

So, what is the wine industry doing about this sort of issue, in terms of its packaging? We hear lots about new forms of packaging (cans, etc), and new labeling, but this may have little to do with the Three-Rs.

Packaging consists of two elements: the wine container, and the transport container. Obviously, in both cases this packaging could be re-used rather than re-cycled.

Glass bottles are actually not too good, in terms of either Reduce or Recycle — glass bottles may well constitute 50% of the wine industry's “carbon footprint” (Carbon footprints, wine and the consumer). The energy used to create a bottle (from sand) can easily be 20 times that for a can (the sand has to be heated to at least 2700 °F / 1500 °C); and recycling is not much better (the glass has to be heated to 1500 °F / 800 °C). So, re-using the bottles (rather than recycling them) provides plenty of scope for improvement, in terms of carbon footprint (Cans or bottles: what’s worse for the environment?) — only for Re-use does a bottle beat a can (who re-uses cans?).

In southern Europe, and sometimes among migrants from there to the New World lands, wine flagons have often been re-used. The customer brings the empty flagon to their local winery, and exchanges it for a full one (and pays for the contents). The used flagon is then cleaned by the winery, and re-filled. This procedure does not involve Recycle, nor does it engender much in the way of transportation costs (ie. it matches Reduce). I actually saw this in practice only once in Australia, long ago, at Paul Conti Wines (formerly Contiville).

More recently, an initiative has been announced in Australia regarding re-use of the transport container (Wine merchant’s sustainability initiative helping local wineries save money):

Michael Zitzlaff has launched a sustainability initiative that is saving wineries thousands. When Zitzlaff saw how many wine box dividers were going into paper recycling every month, he thought there must be a better way to reuse them ... Many local boutique winemakers deliver their wines directly to stores, so Michael started putting the box dividers aside for the next time a local winemaker would visit the store ... Together, the [ten] stores have collected 12,800 carton dividers, which are now on their way to be reused by local wineries to bottle the 2020 vintage – which is a saving of over $10,000 for the wineries.

I am not suggesting that this particular idea can be easily implemented everywhere, but it does show the sort of thing that can be done, if people start to think about the concept of Re-use, as well as Reduce and Recycle.

It seems to me that the wine industry still has a long way to go in terms of recognizing that Re-use actually precedes Recycle in the Three-Rs. Hopefully, this will change in the near future.

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Burnable recycling in Sweden is used to heat buildings. In towns, every house has its own insulated hot-water pipe connection, as well as a cold-water pipe. Every house is heavily insulated (roof, walls, foundations) and all windows are double-glazed — snow in Sweden does not melt off roofs! Each house is centrally heated by water-filled heaters, either as an element under each window (eg. my previous house) or under the floor (my current house). In town, this hot water comes from a power-generation plant, which uses a high-intensity incinerator to heat the water. There is no such thing as "rubbish" in Sweden — everything gets used one way or another.

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).

Beer countries and wine countries

In the world of alcohol consumption there are beer drinkers, wine drinkers, and alcoholics. Some countries are considered to have mostly beer drinkers, and others have mostly wine drinkers. But how many countries are there of each?

In order to find out, I have had a look at the data for 2015, as contained in the Annual Database of Global Wine Markets, compiled by Anderson,  Nelgen and Pinilla. Tables 41b (Volume of beverage wine consumption per adult) and 45b (Volume of beer consumption per adult) contain the information that we want.

Note that we need to standardize the data for each country, in order to deal with different population sizes and demographies (ie. we should compare consumption per adult), as well as standardizing for alcohol content, since wine has up to three times as much as beer (ie. we should compare liters of alcohol).

The result is shown in the graph, for 47 countries. Each point represents one country, located vertically based on liters of alcohol consumed as beer per adult during 2015, and horizontally based on liters of alcohol consumed as wine per adult during 2015. The USA is shown as the red point.

The pink line indicates equality of consumption — the countries above the line consume more beer than wine, and those below the line consume more wine than beer. Note that there are three countries in the dataset that consume very little alcohol (Algeria, Morocco and India); and there is only one other country where beer and wine consumption are roughly equal — New Zealand, of all places.

There are 11 countries where wine consumption greatly exceeds beer consumption — from right to left in the graph: Portugal, Croatia, France, Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, Denmark, Argentina, Greece, Georgia, and Uruguay. Note that all but two of these are in Europe, which surprises no-one.

However, what might surprise you is the presence of Denmark in this list, as Scandinavia has principally been a beer-drinking world (after they stopped drinking honey mead, long ago). Indeed, both Sweden and Norway are just above the graph line (at c. 2 liters of wine and 2.5 liters of beer). Sweden is actually know to beer producers as a great market for boutique beers (there are even beers that are sold only in Sweden and their homeland). Indeed, as this post is being published, Sweden is awash in purpose-brewed Easter beers — there is no such thing as an Easter wine (there are, however, Easter lilies).

So, there are 32 / 47 countries that distinctly prefer beer to wine. However, note that the top three beer consumers (from the top of the graph: Belgium-Luxembourg, Germany, and Austria) also consume as much wine as do half of the 11 wine-drinking countries — they just drink three times as much beer as wine! (Note: UNESCO recently included "Wine Culture in Germany" in its Federal List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.)

The fourth-place beer drinkers (Ireland) do not do too bad in the wine stakes, either. The British only slightly prefer beer to wine (3.8 vs. 3.1 liters), whereas Americans have a three-fold preference for beer (4.2 vs. 1.4 liters). Canadians drink slightly more wine and slightly less beer than do Americans, whereas South Africans drink the same amount of wine but somewhat less beer.

Australia is sixth in beer consumption, just behind Romania, and just ahead of Spain; but, surprisingly, Australians drink 60% more wine than do the Spaniards. The fact that the people of Spain drink twice as much beer as wine makes them the odd-ones-out among the major wine-producing countries of Europe. This needs looking into. (And you should try finding on the web a picture with a Spanish wine and a Spanish beer in the same image!)