I was poking around in some of the statistics offered by the Wine Institute earlier today looking for global per capita wine consumption. I found the numbers for 2004-2008 and was quite surprised by some of them.

If I were I an investigative journalist with a lot of time on my hands, or a behavioral economist with a fast command of world trade facts, I might be able to answer the question “why?” for each of the following. But I’ve got other things to do, so I’ll just ply you with trivia and hope you win $50 from a friend the next time you’re all sitting around at a wine bar.

The country with the highest per-capita wine consumption in the world is…. wait for it…. the city/state/country of Vatican City. The Pope and his boys (all 931 of them) drink 66.67 liters of wine per capita per year. Of course, that’s only about a bottle every four days, which among my friends isn’t nearly enough. But way to go Catholic church. I’d pay good money for the chance to explore their wine cellar for an afternoon. The second highest country is little Norfolk Island out in the middle of nowhere South Pacific, whose 1,828 residents (understandably — can you say depressingly isolated?) drink more than the average French citizen.

There are more than twenty countries in the world who register effectively zero wine consumption per-capita per year, including North Korea (I guess our dear leader ’s personal stocks of Bordeaux don’t count) and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The country with the greatest jump in wine consumption per capita between 2004 and 2008 was Nigeria, with a jump of 1236.2% to .33 liters consumed on average. Anyone care to explain that? It was followed closely by Macau, whose consumption per capita jumped almost 690%.

The country with the greatest drop in wine consumption was again a little island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, Nauru. Perhaps they lost their wine distributor? But the 13,287 residents saw an 88% drop in per capita consumption between 2004 and 2008. The 574 residents of the Cocos Islands likewise saw a 75.6% drop. And poor Burundi, sandwiched between The Congo and Tanzania drank 73% less wine per capita in 2008 than 2004, though it’s not clear whether this figure was skewed by the huge influx of refugees fleeing the fighting in the Congo, and clearly had better things to worry about than drinking wine.

Other interesting trends: more mainstream tropical paradises saw huge gains in wine consumption per capita over the four years, with the Antilles, St. Kitts, Turks and Caicos, and St. Vincent all posting 100% or greater gains. The middle east, especially Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates also posted huge gains, as well as a number of poor or unstable African countries like Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Malawi, whose leaders are probably spending more on wine than on some basic social services.

At the highest level, there are far more countries where wine consumption is rising than the opposite, and global consumption between 2004 and 2008 rose 3.5%. And that is most certainly a good thing.

If you’re curious, take a look at the stats yourself (PDF).

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Yesterday I wrote a post in which I remarked on the relative few numbers of wine bloggers in the UK compared with the US (even considering the differences in size of our two nations). One of the comments left by a reader got me thinking a lot about the differences in wine culture between our two nations, and the degree to which those differences might be responsible for the much lower ratio of wine bloggers to wine drinkers in the UK. Moreover, there are a lot of countries in Europe that also have far fewer wine bloggers than might be expected: France, Spain, and Italy all have less than 200 wine bloggers each as far as I know.

Commenter King Krak, suggested that “My thinking on this is that it’s simply a smaller percentage of the population are passionate about wine.”

My first reaction to this idea was dismissive, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if it really might be true. I also started wondering if there might be an inverse relationship between what I will call the strength and homogeneity of the wine culture in a country and the tendency for people to blog about wine.

Let’s get the following disclaimer right up front: except for the consumption numbers below, I have no data to back up the following line of conjecture. It’s 100% pure speculation, and I welcome any corrections or damning evidence to the contrary.

There are definite differences between the US and nearly every European country when it comes to wine. The biggest one can be captured in a single statistic: annual per-capita consumption of wine. In the US, we drink on average 9.68 liters of wine per year. In the UK, they drink 19.14 liters per year. In France they drink 53.22 liters of wine per year.

I believe a significant cultural difference accompanies this variance in consumption. Or perhaps more accurately, I believe a significant cultural difference drives this difference in consumption. The cliché of wine as food in Europe comes from somewhere.

Here in the USA, we have what on a bad day I’d call a stunted wine culture. Being more optimistic in general, a better characteristic might be fledgling. But in either case, the relationship Americans have with wine feels at best slightly dysfunctional. As I have written before, our relationship with wine is riddled with class connotations, self-esteem problems, and intimidation. Wine in America is not commonplace enough to be treated like any other beverage. Instead it gets a vaunted status that carries with it a lot of oppressive baggage.

Could one of the consequences of this situation be the existence of the demographic called the wine geek? It certainly seems somewhat plausible that the desire to immerse oneself in the passion of wine, and then turn around and evangelize it to the world (or at least your closest friends) seems much more likely in a culture where most people only drink wine on special occasions, as opposed to a culture where wine is part of every meal. Add to that situation the deep penetration of internet technologies and a dash of American ego, and perhaps you have the ingredients for the wine blog explosion in the US.

I wonder if America has more wine writers per capita than the UK, France, Italy, or Spain? Does a country with a relatively constrained wine culture produce a stronger market for writing about it? Note that I’m not just talking about the proclivity to drink wine, as there’s obviously not a correlation between low per-capita wine consumption and the number of wine geeks in a country. Just ask the folks in Burundi, whose annual wine consumption hovers around .1 liters per capita.

But even absent this correlation, the converse of the American situation seems equally plausible to me. “Why write or talk about wine when you can just drink it,” the average Italian might say. Sure, there are wine critics, writers, and magazines in most European countries, but I wonder if, like wine bloggers, they may be fewer in number for that reason? Your average European might be less inclined to pick up a wine magazine (or more to the point, start a wine blog) for the same reason that there aren’t a lot of tanning salons in Tahiti.

This is obviously not a well researched thesis, and probably won’t stand up to even the most cursory of analytical inquiries, but there’s something to be said, I think for the aspects of American wine culture, versus the rest of Europe, and the reason why there might be more wine bloggers in the US than everywhere else.

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One of the longest running UK wine bloggers, Andrew Barrow recently wrote an article on his blog Spittoon, entitled The Definitive List of UK Wine Bloggers. My first reaction after reading it was: that’s it ?!?!?

His list of every single wine blog published in the UK was merely 28 URLs long, and one of those was actually written by someone who lives in Spain. Granted, this list did not include blogs by wine retailers or by UK wineries, but even so, it is remarkably, even dumbfoundingly brief. Another reader of Andrew’s blog chimed in suggesting the list was more like 70 long. Even so, that is far below the number I would have suspected, especially given that the number of wine bloggers in the US exceeds 1000 at this point.

With 30 million residents, the UK is roughly one sixth the size of the United States, yet its wine blogging population is easily 1/150th that of the U.S. And this from a country that has arguably the longest history of, and highest quality of, wine writing in the world.

The lack of English (and from my anecdotal experience, European as well) wine blogs is truly surprising, and likely not pure happenstance. Something cultural or circumstantial is clearly at work.

I’d suggest it’s purely a matter of sensibility.

That is, most of the British are far too sensible to dither away their time spouting wine nonsense on the Internet. Indeed, why would they spend hours of their precious time each day offering up their own opinions about wine on the internet when they could be doing something much more rewarding, like having a pint with friends? Or is it just that they can pick up a newspaper and read Jancis Robinson anytime they want, so why even make the attempt? Or is it that Americans are just narcissistic hams who want more attention than we deserve?

Joking aside, I’m struggling to find any demographic explanation for the situation, whether due to age differences of our respective populations (insignificant), wine drinking habits (they drink more than we do), etc.

Got any theories?

Image courtesy of Foxtongue.

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