Report reveals how much wine is being produced each year — and who’s drinking it
By Will Lyons, Wall Street Journal
How many bottles of wine do you think were produced last year? A friend and I were trying to figure out an answer to this question over supper the other day. I won’t embarrass myself by revealing how far off I was, but let’s just say it was by a very long way.
The latest figures from International Wine & Spirit Research (IWSR), a London-based drinks research group, in a report commissioned by Vinexpo, estimate that in 2013, 3.2 billion cases of wine were produced. That’s 38.4 billion bottles—quite an astonishing number. The majority, 54 percent, is red wine, compared with 37 percent for white and 9 percent for rosé.
Who drinks it all? The quick answer is Europe and the U.S. But if I were to ask you to name the No. 1 wine-consuming country by volume, I suspect you might guess France. Wrong.
According to the IWSR, the U.S. is still the biggest market by volume, drinking a total of 339 million cases of wine in 2013. This was above France’s 296 million cases, Italy’s 288 million, Germany’s 274 million and China’s 144 million (which made it the world’s fifth largest consumer of wine). The U.K. came in sixth, drinking a total of 133 million cases.
Per capita wine consumption is perhaps the more interesting figure. Here, Italy leads the pack, ahead of France, Switzerland, Portugal and Austria. In terms of total market value (which nation spends the most on wine), the top three are the U.S., France and the U.K., with Britain forecast to increase its spending over the next three years, nudging France into third place. The IWSR predicts that by 2018, the top two still-wine markets by value, the U.S. and U.K., will be worth $33.2 billion and $17.1 billion respectively.