American Stats

[Roy Hersh]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011 ... ENSUS.html

[Eric Menchen]

So if the average American consumes 2.5 gallons of wine, how many Americans have to consume none to make up for Roy?

[Peter W. Meek]

I probably drink in the neighborhood of 1.5 gallons per week -- 75 gallons a year. It does suggest that there may be a few tee-totalers out there.

[Roy Hersh]

Back in around 2000 when I was involved in the wine trends, creating wine lists, doing Napa/Sonoma 4x/year EVERY year, yada/yada ... with my hand on the pulse compared to today ... only 11% of Americans over the legal drinking wine ever had consumed wine at least 1x in their lifetime. I was astounded, but found the research done by the "hated" WSWA ... was done in a very thorough way. That was pathetically low, but has gone up pretty significantly since. I don't know the number but am sure it is now over 15%. Still a very paltry number overall.

When you look at the annual consumption numbers for Germany, France, Italy and Spain ... it makes them seem like they're drinking wine for breakfast 350 days a year. America is still a very puritanical country in MANY ways. Wine consumption is just one of them.