Per capita US wine consumption, by state

We are often told about how much wine each of the people in any given geographical area drink, or sometimes beer, or spirits. However, this is vitiated by the fact that each area has a different number of people. The people of Sweden, for example, are not likely to drink as much as the people of New York state, because there are only half as many of them. Similarly, of course, we all drink more wine now than before, because there are more people now.

So, what we need to do is work out consumption per person, at each time, in each region. This is the per capita consumption, which we get by dividing the volume of consumption by the population size.

There are official data for yearly wine consumption per capita in the USA, as a whole, going back as far as the end of Prohibition. The source I have used for the first graph is the Wine Institute. The graph shows the data for consumption of “all wine types including sparkling wine, dessert wine, vermouth, other special natural and table wine”, and using the Bureau of the Census’s data for the resident population size. Per capita consumption would, of course, be slightly greater if based only on people of legal drinking age.

The data show average wine consumption in liters per person (vertically) for every year (horizontally). To convert liters to bottles, if that is what you prefer, we need to multiply by 1.3.

While the trend is basically upwards through time, towards more consumption per person, there are a number of interesting features. For example, note the sudden increase in 1946, the year after World War II ended, and the sudden increase in 2020, the first year of the current pandemic — the same response, but under two very different circumstances. The 2020 burst has been commented upon repeatedly in the media, across several countries. Whether it continues throughout 2021 may depend on global supply chains (The next pandemic-related shortage? Wine and liquor).

Obviously, wine consumption increased rapidly after the end of Prohibition, with a bit of a dip during the War; but consumption then plateaued during the 1950s and early 1960s. There was then a steady increase from 1965 to 1985, which was certainly a different time for American society — officially, the births of the Baby Boomer generation ended in 1965, when the first of that cohort reached adulthood. So, we now know that they were bigger boozers than were the Silent Generation (before them). The mid-80s downturn coincides with the Generation X cohort arriving at adulthood — to this day, they remain a commercial problem for the wine industry.

The continued rise in wine consumption since the mid 1990s is sometimes attributed to the increasing popularity of the so-called Mediterranean Diet (eg. American wine consumption per capita since 1994):

Since 1994, American wine consumption has experienced year over year growth. Many attribute the sparking of this phenomena to an event that happened a little less than three years prior. In November 1991, 60 Minutes aired a report about French diets and heart disease rates: American and French researchers interviewed by 60 Minutes pointed to an apparent relationship between moderate alcohol consumption, particularly red wine, and a lower rate of heart disease.

This rise has reached a plateau since 2015 (with the exception of 2020), representing the trend toward alcohol moderation among younger generations. The current average consumption is c. 14.5 bottles of wine per person per year, or 1 bottle every 3.5 weeks.

We could now move on to look in more detail at the per capita consumption in 2019, the most recent “normal” year. We can break this down by US state, using data from the AAWE (Per capita wine consumption in the United States, 2019). The data in this next table show the liters of wine consumed per person during that year, for each territory separately, plus the national average.

To make the general patterns clear, I have also added an indication of the geographical location of each area, which frequently coincides with societal differences. These are basically the official US Census Regions and Divisions.

It is pretty obvious, isn't it? The big wine boozers are in the north-east of the country, and a fair part of the west. The south and mid-west are much more moderate in their wine intake — they are, however, known to prefer some other alcoholic beverages, instead. The fact that D.C. is way out in front surprises nobody — at c. 39 bottles of wine per person per year, that is 1 bottle every 9 days, which might actually be quite moderate consumption for a bureaucrat. It seems likely that the retirees of Florida came from up north somewhere, and brought their wine habit with them. Moreover, it looks like the people of Maryland and Pennsylvania could usefully be targeted by wine salespersons.

An alternative view of similar data from 2018 is provided by VinePair, who plot their data as a map, instead.

The Real top wineries of Australia

We have recently been told that the Number of Australians drinking wine has gone up significantly in 2021 (it is now 46%). Most of them drink Australian wine, for obvious reasons, with a reasonable number of imports from New Zealand. There is also, of course, considerable international interest (Why Australia’s latest wines are making waves). It therefore seems reasonable to ask whether we can work out which are the top wineries in Australia.

Well, we could at least try.

About 70% of all Australian wine by volume comes from the three big inland irrigated wine regions: Murray Darling, Riverina, and Riverland. In my youth, these were treated as environmental disasters, as the routine flood irrigation of the well-leached semi-desert soils simply brought all of the salts back up to the surface, making agriculture difficult. They are usually mentioned just in passing in wine books. However, the winemakers recently announced that they were forming a new association, Australian Commercial Wine Producers Limited (ACWP), to lobby for more of a say in Australia’s wine policy.

At the other extreme, the Canberra District has less than 500 ha of vineyards, with 34 wine producers (although only a dozen are well-known). Needless to say, all of these cool-climate wines are of premium quality. Obviously, it is likely to be these sorts of wineries that appear in any list of the best.

The method I will use in this post is to look at the winery rankings from The Real Review, a web site run by Huon Hooke and Bob Campbell, along with their collaborators (listed here).

Each year since 2018, they have presented a ranking of the wineries from New Zealand (by Bob Campbell) and from Australia (by Huon Hooke). The rankings are based on the average scores for all of the wines they have tasted during that year, from each of the wineries.

Many wine commentators seem to see their job as encouragement, and thus present optimistic wine ratings, for example. The Real Review, on the other hand, prides itself on being much more realistic. In this sense, their wine scores and winery rankings might well be a very good place for me to start.

However, it is important at the outset to emphasize that only a subset of the wines of Australia and New Zealand get tasted in any given year. In this sense, it is entirely possible for a winery to not be ranked in any given year, even if it has scored highly in other years, simply because insufficient wines were rated that year (the minimum necessary appears to be 2).

So, what I have done is download the winery lists for each of the four years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). These simply list the wineries in rank order of their wine scores, with a different number of wineries each year. I then pooled the yearly lists for each country, giving me a combined list of 690 wineries for Australia, which I will report here.

From these combined lists I extracted the data for only those wineries that appeared in all four yearly lists, which is 197 (29%) of them. (Number of wineries that appeared three times: 117, appeared twice: 153, appeared once: 223.) These consistent wineries were then given a new rank, within each year, based solely on this subset of the wineries. I then averaged these rankings, thus producing a list, showing those wineries that rated consistently well across all fours years. (Note: Neal Hulkower has recently noted that this approach is called the Borda Count.)

This final list is included at the bottom of the post.

This list is not too bad, given the limitations of the original data. While we cannot say that all of the top wineries are included, or that they have necessarily risen to the top of the list, those wineries that are listed at the top are definitely among Australia's top wineries.

I could, of course, argue with some of the rankings. For example, based on my own recent experience, some wineries do seem to be a bit low down the list; for instance: Lark Hill, Tim Adam, Margan, Leconfield, O'Leary Walker, Stanton & Killeen, and Baileys of Glenrowan.

There are also wineries that scored well on those few occasions when they appeared in a list, including: Bindi Wines, Silkman Wines, Houghton, Bekkers Wine, Poonawatta, and Wendouree. I can also think of a few good wineries whose wines I drink, but that are not present in the lists in all years, or are missing entirely, including: Peel Estate, Knight Granite Hills, FireBlock, Paracombe, Delatite, Pauletts, Tahbilk, Brand's Laira, Dandelion, Josef Chromy, and Logan Weemala.

I know of no alternative list of wineries; so this one is what we have. If you want to learn a bit more about some of the Australian wineries, then James Halliday’s Wine Companion site has notes about more than 2,000 of them (not all still extant). There are, of course, ranked lists of individual wines, such as the Langton Classification of Australian Wine (based on auction prices), but not of the wineries themselves.

So, we could compare this list with one alternative, which produced somewhat different results. This is the Wine & Spirits Top 100 Wineries of 2021, “as determined by their performance in the magazine’s two-step blind-tasting process, and celebrated for their exceptional wines”. This lists only three Australian wineries, which is one less than the number listed for Greece! These are: d’Arenberg, Penfolds, and Woodlands.

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Australia's top wineries, as consistently ranked by The Real Review

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

Average score 192.0 191.5 190.8 190.3 188.0 186.5 185.3 184.5 182.8 180.3 179.8 178.8 177.0 174.8 173.3 171.5 171.0 170.5 170.3 169.0 167.3 164.0 162.8 161.5 160.3 159.5 158.8 158.3 158.3 157.0 156.5 155.0 153.5 153.3 152.8 152.5 152.3 150.3 150.3 149.5 148.5 148.3 148.0 146.3 144.5 144.5 142.8 140.3 138.8 137.0 136.8 136.5 136.0 133.8 132.8 132.5 131.5 130.8 130.8 130.0 129.5 128.5 126.3 124.8 123.8 122.3 121.3 120.8 120.8 118.5 117.5 117.3 117.0 115.8 115.8 114.3 113.8 113.5 112.5 112.3 112.0 112.0 111.0 111.0 110.5 110.5 110.3 109.3 108.0 107.3 103.3 103.0 100.8 100.8 100.5 100.0 99.5 99.3 98.0 98.0 97.5 97.0 96.8 96.0 95.3 94.5 93.5 89.8 89.0 89.0 88.0 87.5 86.3 85.5 84.8 84.3 84.0 82.8 82.5 79.5 78.3 78.3 75.0 73.5 73.5 72.8 72.5 72.3 71.3 71.0 70.5 70.5 69.0 68.3 67.3 65.5 64.3 63.5 62.3 60.0 60.0 59.5 59.5 59.3 58.8 58.3 58.0 57.0 56.5 53.5 52.8 52.5 52.0 51.5 51.0 50.8 49.0 48.3 47.8 46.5 46.3 45.5 44.8 44.5 44.0 44.0 43.8 43.5 43.3 41.5 41.3 39.5 39.3 38.8 38.5 38.3 37.8 36.0 35.5 33.8 33.0 32.8 32.5 32.0 30.8 29.0 24.8 24.5 24.3 23.0 22.5 21.8 18.8 18.0 17.3 16.5 16.3

Winery Hardys Cullen Wines Penfolds Yarra Yering Wine By Farr Wynns Coonawarra Estate Henschke Mount Pleasant Yering Station Oakridge Wines Château Tanunda Yalumba Best's Great Western Lake's Folly Clonakilla Giant Steps Howard Park Wines Pooley Wines Mount Mary Vineyard Torbreck Brokenwood Wines Stonier Tyrrell's Wines Tolpuddle Vineyard Hentley Farm Wines Vasse Felix Moss Wood Head Wines Taylors Morris Frankland Estate Yangarra Estate Vineyard Woodlands Yeringberg Langmeil Winery Robert Stein Vineyard Handpicked Wines Cape Mentelle Pewsey Vale Grosset Xanadu Vinden Estate Levantine Hill TarraWarra Estate Balgownie Estate Wolf Blass Yabby Lake Vineyard Jim Barry Wines Moorilla Estate Crawford River Wines Stella Bella Wines St Hallett Tapanappa Voyager Estate Thompson Estate Hayes Family Wines Mount Langi Ghiran Vineyards Hickinbotham Clarendon Vineyard John Duval Wines Pepper Tree Wines Fraser Gallop Estate Devil's Lair Terre À Terre Polperro & Even Keel Wines Bellwether Quealy Brown Brothers Shaw + Smith Ten Minutes by Tractor d'Arenberg Leeuwin Estate Petaluma Seppeltsfield Bird in Hand Dr Edge Seppelt Hoddles Creek Estate Gundog Estate Sittella Wines Mayer Eldorado Road Fighting Gully Road Aphelion Freycinet Vineyard Crittenden Estate Wirra Wirra De Bortoli Flametree Domaine Naturaliste Coriole Hurley Vineyard Ross Hill Keith Tulloch Wine McHenry Hohnen Vintners Delamere Mount Majura Vineyard Huntington Estate Michael Hall L.A.S Vino Stefano Lubiana Wines Soumah St Hugo House of Arras Singlefile S.C. Pannell Peter Lehmann Montalto Vineyards Mewstone Wines Evans & Tate Wantirna Estate Mount Horrocks Home Hill Stargazer Thistledown Wines Curly Flat Kreglinger Wine Estates Glaetzer Wines Elderton Sidewood Sons Of Eden Cloudburst Samuel's Gorge Chaffey Bros. Wine Co De Salis Longview Vineyard Allegiance Wines Baileys of Glenrowan Gemtree Vineyards Port Phillip Estate Bream Creek Eldridge Estate Primo Estate Balnaves of Coonawarra Z Wine First Drop Wines Bremerton Wines Schmölzer & Brown Artisans of Barossa Gala Estate Deviation Road Stanton & Killeen Domaine Chandon Pressing Matters Tertini Wines Lake Breeze Wines Juniper Estate Windows Estate Karrawatta Jacob's Creek Clyde Park Vineyard Flowstone Pikes Chapel Hill O'Leary Walker Wines Derwent Estate Helm Meerea Park Robert Oatley Vineyards Two Hands Wines Geoff Weaver UMAMU Estate Kalleske Schwarz Wine Company Bay of Fires Wines Calabria Family Wines Leconfield Foxeys Hangout Philip Shaw Grace Farm Castle Rock Estate Margan Family Shingleback Prancing Horse Estate The Lane Vineyard Snake + Herring Craiglee Tim Adams Kilikanoon Massena Vineyards Alkoomi Higher Plane Wines Lark Hill David Hook Wines Tim Smith Wines Geoff Merrill Wines Moppity Vineyards Pike & Joyce Lou Miranda Estate Vinea Marson Oliver's Taranga Vineyards Sandalford Thorn-Clarke Tenafeate Creek Wines Bleasdale Vineyards Brown Magpie Wines Catlin Wines Heroes Wines

How faithful are American value-wine drinkers?

For several years now, the USA has been named the “most attractive” wine market, by the Global Compass report. However, this does not mean that the USA does well across all wine categories, as a producer. For example, Michael Franz has recently commented on The scandalously poor performance of affordable American wine.

The scandal in American wine is, apparently, that: “the United States produces distressingly few globally competitive wines costing $20 or less.” This is in spite of the report that US wine reached an average of $10 per bottle for the first time back in 2017. That is: “Consumer thirst for higher-quality wine has pushed the average price for the equivalent of a standard-sized 750-milliliter bottle of wine sold by US retailers passed $10 a bottle.”

I am interested in wines at less than $20-per-bottle because that is the price I try to target for good-value wines (ie. it is possible to find good wines at this price, but you have to do a bit of searching). As I have noted before (Finding inexpensive wines), the searching can be done, in the USA, with the aid of web sites like the Wine Curmudgeon and the Reverse Wine Snob.

In terms of good-value wines in the price range that we are discussing here, these sites have been known to suggest brands like McManis, as well as Castle Rock, Chateau Ste. Michelle, and the Robert Mondavi Private Selection. These wines are even exported to places like Sweden, as I can attest (Sweden is currently the 9th biggest US export market by value).

These recommendation sites do not, of course, recommend things like Charles Shaw wines, whose history has been recently reviewed (Two Buck Chuck and the lure of bargain wine). This wine was originally made by the Bronco Wine Co. as a private label for Trader Joe’s; and, at a price of $1.99, it has apparently sold almost one thousand million bottles since 2001. As noted in the article:

Almost 20 years later, Two Buck Chuck is still here. It still sells for $1.99 in California, though it has risen as high as $2.99 over the years, while shipping costs have raised the price elsewhere in the country to as much as $3.99. Still, even at that price, it costs about half as much as the average bottle of wine.

As pointed out above, it is actually notably less than half of the average, which is now $10. Much closer to half the current average price is: The cheap wine that turned Americans on to fine wine, the E&J Gallo Hearty Burgundy, which retails at $9 for a double bottle. Launched way back in 1964, it was marketed as a thirst-quenching dinner wine of consistency and reliability. It quickly came to dominate the market, selling two million cases annually.

In terms of wine production, E&J Gallo, Constellation, The Wine Group and Treasury Wine Estates (originally from Australia) are currently the major producers in the USA. This does not at all mean that the best-selling brands come from all of these companies, as they each own oodles of wine brands. According to Statista, the five leading table-wine brands in the USA in 2020 (in million U.S. dollars) were:

Finally, it is clear that a lot of the inexpensive wines in the USA come from elsewhere in the world, perhaps supporting Michael Franz' assertion. Or, as Don Kavanagh has put it:

If we were to tell you that you could get a 97-point wine for less than the price of a steak, you'd probably think we were crazy — but you can. Okay, you might have to go to Europe to buy it, which would add considerably to the cost of the bottle ...

The big-selling imported wines in the USA tend to be somewhere near the average bottle price. The American Association of Wine Economists periodically lists America's top imported wine brands, in terms of volume. It is therefore instructive to compare the various lists over recent decades (eg. VinePair). The most recent compilation (AAWE) looks like this (in thousands of 9-liter cases) for the four lists over the past 20 years:

Only the top 10 brands are listed each year, but there are 24 brands in total, across the 20 years. Only Concha y Toro and Riunite appear in all four lists, with Cavit and Lindemans appearing three times each. This does not show a lot of long-term faithfulness by American cheap-wine drinkers (60% of the brands appear in only one list).

In terms of dominance, back in 1991 Riunite accounted for 36% of the wine sold by the top-10 brands, but it has faded since then, accounting for 5—15% of the wine. Mind you, it is still the biggest wine company in Italy (Italy's biggest companies). In 2011 and 2019, Yellow Tail also managed to dominate, accounting for 36% and 30%, respectively, of the wine sold by the top-10 brands.

In those latter two years, Cavit managed 15% of the wine, in second place. However, back in 2001 the top brand was Concha y Toro, which accounted for only 16% of the wine sold by the top-10 brands. This indicates a much more even marketplace for wine importers in the USA, at the turn of the century, unlike at any other time.

Meanwhile, in the distribution tier of the US three-tier alcohol system, three companies — Southern Glazer’s, RNDC/Youngs and Breakthru Beverage — appear to control close to two-thirds of all wine sales in the USA, after a decade of severe consolidation. This indicates as much industry dominance as is present in the wine imports. Consumers do not, of course, show any faithfulness towards distributors.

The (saddest) effect of Covid-19 on the wine industry

This is an unusual "data" post, for this blog, because the only real data is the number 4.

We all have Covid-19 stories. Mine is probably better than many peoples', but it still hurts. A few years ago, I managed to get back to Australia in time to see both my father and my sister one last time before they died (which they did in the same week). Well, last year I planned to do the same thing for my brother. The Australian government had other plans, however, isolating themselves fairly effectively from the pandemic-ridden world.

I then tried to make it back for my brother's funeral later in the year, but was prevented again. The quarantine hotels in South Australia were closed just before I was due to travel, due to a lying pizza worker (Pizza worker at centre of South Australia lockdown 'unaware' of public attention). I made an online appearance at the funeral, but you can imagine that this was a very poor substitute.

Obviously, I was not the only one affected by the Australian government's quarantine restrictions. For example, in early 2020 it was noted that One-third of Australia's wineries could go under because of coronavirus pandemic, which is of more relevance to the blog.

This brings us to the topic of this post, which is the psychological response of people in the agriculture industry to these situations. I have already discussed people leaving their vineyards (France's changing wine industry). However, this sometimes also reaches the ultimate extreme. It has been noted (Walk beside me and be my friend) for Australia:

The agriculture industry has a higher rate of mental health issues and a higher suicide risk in the country per capita than in the city. Low crops, drought, inherited farms, unemployment, to name a few.

Death is a topic that cannot be over-looked, and so I thought that it is worth raising here. We currently live in economically uncertain times, and this affects the wine industry just as much as anywhere else in agriculture. This often means that non-natural deaths increase in number, and so it has recently been for wine-making as well.

There have been four wine-industry suicides in France publicly announced so far: Dominique Belluard (Domaine Belluard, Savoie), Laurent Vaillé (La Grange des Pères, Languedoc), Pascal Clairet (Domaine de la Tournelle, Jura), and Olivier Lemasson (Les Vins Contés, Loire). There may have also been others, less well-known. English-language commentaries on these four people have appeared:

• Arbois bids adieu to two exemplary vignerons
• Lord of the Gringets: An appreciation
• Paradise lost — a eulogy for two great natural winemakers
• The fall of the Jura?

The cause here is, of course, the combination of a pandemic with one of the worst vineyard years on record: French wine production could be the lowest in at least 40 years — if not ever. This is in stark contrast to recent decades, where things have looked pretty good. Andrew Jefford (Appellations: time for change?) has recently reminded us that:

Many French appellations were created in the 1930s. It was a decade of execrable weather, economic depression and political foreboding: life couldn’t have been tougher for growers ... In the past 40 years, everything has changed. Economic conditions are benign; fine-wine regions have prospered beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations.

Sadly, the future is now much less certain, once again. In the short term we have this: Global wine trade faces turbulent times. In the long term, we have this: Six environmental threats that could alter the future of the booze industry. As Jonathan Pedley has asked: Who would grow grapes for a living?

Depression is not unique to the wine industry, of course. In 2016, it was reported that: French farming hit by ‘600 suicides a year’. That is a helluva lot of humans, in a country of c. 65 million people (1 in 100,000). The basis is quite clear, as expressed by a 2019 report: ‘Farming doesn’t feed us’: The story of France’s ailing agriculture. Nor are agriculture suicides unique to France, either (The devastating drought across the [U.S.] West could mean an increase in farmer suicides). Indeed, it seems to be particularly problematic in India.

This does not necessarily have to be all gloom and doom, of course. Yes, the global death rate is known to be surprisingly high, at precisely 100%. However, before our time comes, there are many things that we could do, to while away the time. The article I cited near the beginning of this post (Walk beside me and be my friend) is actually a story about a wine-maker who made a comeback from serious professional depression, with the help of his friends and colleagues. It would be good if it acted as inspiration for people, rather than the other, much sadder, alternative.