Wine Drinkers Know Less, Don’t Care

The average consumer knows less about wine than two years ago – but that hasn’t stopped people from spending big bucks on vino.

In fact, there is some evidence that people who know less might even be spending more.

These are findings from UK-based Wine Intelligence. To measure wine knowledge, the company asks consumers how many varietals and wine regions they are aware of. They also ask how many types of wine they consume.

The decline in wine knowledge and variety of consumption is slight. For example, the biggest decline in diversity of consumption from 2019 to 2021 came in Brazil, where consumers dropped from drinking 5.8 different varietals to 5.2.

However, the decline in both was also nearly universal. Of the nine key countries surveyed, only the UK showed a slight increase in wine knowledge from 2019 to 2021. Australian consumers showed the largest drop in wine knowledge, but knowledge also declined in the US, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, China, South Korea and Germany.

Wine Intelligence CEO Lulie Halstead said that younger consumers especially are simply outsourcing their memory from their brains to their smartphones.

“Because we can look information up when we need it, we don’t store the facts that we need every day,” Halstead told Wine-Searcher (home of a comprehensive wine encyclopedia, by the way).

Importantly, consumer confidence in buying wine stayed very similar from 2019 to 2021. It did drop a bit in the US – something to keep an eye on – but it went up in South Korea and stayed nearly the same in the other seven countries.

Same old story

I have been covering wine professional conferences for years and every single time somebody gets up and tells the audience that the wine industry does a lousy job of reaching out to consumers, who are unable to understand the complex question of which wine to buy. This Wine Intelligence data shows that maybe that semiannual harangue is unnecessary. If consumers are buying wine without knowing much about it, maybe wine industry marketing is better than we give it credit for.

“The wine industry has done a really good job of making wine democratized,” Halstead said. “Consumers don’t feel like they need a lot specialized knowledge to enjoy wine. For the majority of consumers, not being intimidated is a good idea. Typically about 10 or 12 percent of wine drinkers in any market are highly knowledgeable, highly engaged, wine knowledge seekers. Typically 80 to 90 percent are not wine knowledge seekers. They’re feeling comfortable and confident in the category even as their objective knowledge has started to reduce a little bit.”

As you might expect, Gen Z and Millennial drinkers score lower on the wine knowledge tests than older consumers – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for wineries.

“If you’re looking at the more general marketplace, older consumers have more wine knowledge, but they typically are not the highest spenders on the market,” Halstead said. “Partly because they use that experience and confidence to buy cheaper wine. They feel confident in their choices. Younger consumers have been in our category a lot less time, so they typically use price as a proxy.”

Halstead said she doesn’t know why UK consumers bucked the less-knowledge trend, but she theorizes that the rise of online buying and of smaller wine shops with smaller selections, instead of giant supermarket wine sections, paradoxically made consumers more aware of their choices.

Wine Intelligence has done the same survey for 10 years, looking for trends. The survey picked up on the fact that Europeans are more knowledgeable about regions while Americans, Canadians and Brits are more aware of brands.

But when we say “more knowledgeable”, the raw numbers will be surprising to anyone who follows sommeliers on Instagram. UK consumers, on average, can name 10 countries that produce wine; South Koreans can name only five. In the US, where you can buy wine from most of the world, consumers can name only seven countries that produce it.

As for types of wine, in the four English-speaking nations surveyed – the UK, US, Australia and Canada – consumers drink fewer than six different varietals. And the English-speaking nations drink the widest variety of wines in the world. Chinese consumers, on average, drink only three different varietals. The other countries in the survey average about five.

“For all of us that work in the wine sector, if we do a reality check of normal people, most normal people have a very different relationship with wine than people in our sector do,” Halstead said.