Portugal leading world wine consumption

My wife and I just spent a very nice week as tourists in the south of Portugal. Portugal is a relatively small country, but it does produce quite a fair amount of wine (10th in the world, and 5th in Europe). One other thing that cannot be missed is the amount of wine that is being drunk, per person. So, this is worth looking at in a blog post.

First, let us look at the actual data. This map shows the amount of wine consumed per person per year for each country (from Wine consumption by country).

As you can see, Portugal is seriously high. It is therefore worth looking at the actual numbers, which we can do in this table (from the same source). As you can see, Portugal is number 2 in the world, at 52 liters per person (ie. 1 liter per week).

What my wife and I noticed during our trip is that almost every person in every restaurant was drinking wine, at both lunch and dinner time. That is, most of the adult population was consuming wine every day.

After all, Portugal has a long tradition of drinking wine — it is normal to treat food and wine as closely connected (unlike, say, beer). So, it is normal to see the same people drinking a glass of wine at both lunch and dinner; and also to see people eating on their own, drinking wine normally. There is also so much wine available, and it is certainly not expensive. Many vines were planted following the devastating earthquake of the 1700s (1755 Lisbon earthquake), after which the area around Porto was also protected. Similarly, the Anglo-French Wars of that same period led to the planting of lots of cultivars in the Portuguese vineyards. Availability leads to cultural habits.

This wine-drinking cultural situation is not necessarily so in the English-speaking world. Unlike mainland Europe, where wine has long been part of the culture, it has not been the case in Britain, especially during the challenging post-WWII years. Moreover, The World Health Organization decreed in 2023 that alcohol is not safe for consumption (No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health); and the public is continually fed a media diet of health warnings (Can the beverage industry stand united amid anti-alcohol animosity on multiple fronts?). I have previously discussed the fact that neither of these latter viewpoints is justified (e.g. Another official study indicating that alcohol is not necessarily a risk for cancer).

It is worth noting that there has previously also been high individual consumption of wine for some nations. If we consider Consumption of wine, beer and spirits in 1899, then we can note that the French apparently consumed 112 liters of wine per head, which is a third of a liter per day. This makes the modern Portuguese look mild!

Consumer preference for screw caps versus corks

In the modern world there is a very large proportion of wine bottles sealed with screw caps rather than corks. Well, I come from Australia, where the screw caps were first popularized, and so this is a topic worth having a look at. This is easy to do using the Closure Survey that the Aluminium Closures Group produces every few years, which will give us an idea of how well the consumers elsewhere are taking to them.

As Wikipedia explains, a screw cap is a metal cap, normally aluminium, that screws onto threads on the neck of a wine bottle, with a thin layer of plastic (often PVDC), cork, rubber, or other soft material used to make a seal with the mouth of the bottle. The idea is to avoid the problems that sometimes occur with oxidation taint of wines bottled with a cork.

The cap was developed at the end of the 1960s at the request of the Australian wine company Yalumba, which then started using them commercially from 1976. However, neither Australian nor New Zealand customers took to them straight away, and so the caps faded away during the 1980s. They made a comeback in both countries during the 1990s; and in this century have become the norm there, also spreading popularly to other places such as the United Kingdom.

We can look at their recent acceptance by consumers in six European countries by looking at the Closure Survey Results 2024. [There are copies of the report available in several languages.] The survey (conducted by the market research institute Censuswide) takes place every five years, and so the graph here shows the results for the latest three surveys. It looks at the preference for the screw caps versus the corks.

As you can see, somewhat more than one-third of the 6,000 consumers surveyed actually preferred screw caps through time, with about the same preferring corks, although the latter decreased through time. Somewhat fewer people had no stated preference.

Screw caps were greatly preferred in Germany and the UK, with corks being greatly preferred in France and Italy. The Spaniards had no preference. Males seemed to prefer corks, although this was decreasing through time, with females preferring screw caps.

The stated reasons for choosing the screw cap were that the bottle was quick and easy to open (no corkscrew necessary), and there is a better wine taste / quality. Alternatively, better wine taste / breathing / aging were the reasons for preferring cork. People seemed to be expecting that the screw caps would prevail in the future.

Sadly, screw caps are often seen by wine companies as being preferable for cheaper wines, with corks being preferred for the more expensive ones. As one simple Australian example, Penfolds bottles their shiraz wines with a screw cap for Koonunga Hill ($15) and Bin 28 ($30) and a cork for Bin 128 ($40) and St Henri ($80). This is very old-fashioned!

There is a difference between small and large wine retailers

I emphasized in a recent blog post that formal academic studies are the best way to understand the various aspects of the wine industry (Wine and health experiments, was my example). In this regard, this week I wish to point out an academic study that has investigated the profitability of wine firms of different sizes within Europe.

Most people should expect that smaller and larger wine businesses (on any continent) are in different situations; but it is worthwhile to look at this in some quantitative detail. Indeed, it is just as interesting as the usual media articles about variations in national wine productions within Europe (eg. Per capita wine production in the European Union).
 
The new study I am referring to is:
   Firm size and profitability: Key determinants of performance in European wine firms
   Journal of Wine Economics (2025) 1–19

The Abstract is:

This article examines the determinants of the profitability of European wine companies using dynamic panel models, analyzing 1,025 firms from 14 countries between 2015 and 2021. Unlike previous research that focused mainly on financial variables, this study incorporates financial, non-financial, macroeconomic, and institutional factors to provide a broader understanding of profitability drivers. Given significant differences between the individual categories, separate analyses were conducted for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large and very large companies (LVL) companies. The results show that higher debt reduces profitability, while a higher ratio of cash flow to operating revenue and firm growth improves profitability. Investment in fixed assets increases the profitability of SMEs, while net asset turnover positively affects both SMEs and LVL firms. Labor productivity significantly influences profitability when SMEs and LVL firms are analyzed separately. Public and private limited companies are more profitable than partnerships or sole traders. Finally, the rule of law positively affects SME profitability.

The most important conclusion is to outline the ways in which the smaller and larger wine businesses are, indeed, in different situations. This surprises no-one, of course, but it is nice to have someone put it in black and white, even if only for Europe. Not only does it matter that there are wine casks, bottles and glasses of different sizes!

Wine and health experiments

It should be obvious to most adults that binge drinking is detrimental to health. However, humans have consumed alcohol for several millennia now, so it should be equally clear that smaller amounts may well be okay. I am a scientist, and my approach is that we need experimental evidence about how much is “too much”.

Indeed, in a couple of months the 2026 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium (January 27-29) will tackle this topic again in one of its sessions:

This straight-talk session cuts through the noise that’s leaving wine professionals scrambling for answers. With U.S. Dietary Guidelines under scrutiny and consumer perception shifting, Felicity Carter will moderate a dialogue with Dr. Laura Catena to address what the science actually reveals and how the industry can communicate responsibly.

Myself, I have written about this topic quite a few times before (look under “Wine health” in the menu to the lower right). I also continue to do my reading in the scientific literature about health; and I have recently come across a review / summary article that is worth highlighting here. It is of most relevance because it is about the quality of the scientific experiments conducted about alcohol intake.

How much is too much? A methodological investigation of the literature on alcohol consumption and health. Journal of Wine Economics (2025):

Until a few years ago, moderate alcohol consumption was thought to have (mild) beneficial effects on health. However, some recent studies have suggested that “there is no safe level” of alcohol intake. Consequently, public health institutions have responded by advising against any level of alcohol use and suggesting governments a number of policies to reduce overall alcohol consumption. Nonetheless, medical studies suffer from a variety of intrinsic limitations that could undermine the reliability of their findings, especially when focusing on low-intake levels. On the one hand, we show that the literature on alcohol consumption may suffer from publication bias; such a problem is known to be present in the scientific literature in general. On the other hand, we discuss other potential sources of bias, which are inevitable due to the infeasibility of randomized controlled trials. We assess a sample of articles for the presence of omitted variable bias, miscalculation of alcohol intake, use of linear in place of non-linear models, lack of validation of Mendelian randomization assumptions, and other possible weaknesses. We conclude that the claim that “there is no safe level” of alcohol intake is not sufficiently supported based on our current scientific knowledge.

So, this gives you a clear idea about what is required for high-quality results, and that plenty of experiments meet these requirements.