The wine industry has been going back and forth on this for years. The beverage category that pioneered its life with Orson Welles claiming that we ‘serve no wine before its time’ has gone back and forth as to whether their market base is older (baby boomers and empty nesters) or younger (millennials or those Gen Xer’s), aficionados (those who read the Wine Spectator) or ‘every person’ (those who read Redbook or Family Circle) or… men or women. And it seemingly changes like the weather in Baltimore (if you wait for five minutes…)!

Anecdotal and researched intel will demonstrate that, in terms of volume, women outspend men on wine. Now I know what some of you are thinking, but remember that women do most of the grocery shopping and, where legal, buy most of the household wine at the same time they are buying produce, dairy and fish. Also, for the longest period of time, women helped drive on-premise sales as it was far more ‘apropos’ for a women to order a glass of Chardonnay in a bar or restaurant than a scotch on the rocks or a martini… though that’s been changing. And while it is increasingly difficult to pinpoint for certain exactly who’s drinking what, a Gallup Poll from July 2009 found that among women who drink, 43 percent say wine is what they drink most often and 28 percent say beer. Among men who drink, 58 percent say beer is what they drink most often and 17 percent say wine. You may have guessed that but why may be a bit more telling.

According to an article published in Nation’s Restaurant News in their ‘Food and Beverage Digest’ (5/25/09), a recent study of over 4000 women found that American women drink more wine than their counterparts in the UK, Germany, and Japan. In this online study, commissioned by VinExpo, among those responding from the USA, 93% said they enjoyed wine once a week while 80% claimed to associate their wine consumption with meals and just 4% claimed to purchase wines by packaging and label preferences! Hooray for these realities which are in contrast with the other countries who, when averaged, had only 72% associating wine with meals and a larger 22% who said that labels and packaging were their primary motivations for considering what to buy. By the way, only 3% of women, all countries, surveyed said they enjoyed wine because they thought it as ‘cool’!

Must be that those American women read Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator with more frequency than they do in Europe and Japan!