Who doesn’t enjoy pairing food and a fancy glass of wine on a special occasion? Portugal, my home country, has many wine lovers and produces a wide variety of great wines.

I know that the Portuguese love their wine, but what about other countries? It should be interesting to determine which countries drink the most wine, so I decided to research statistics and find out. You may be surprised at the results. I know I sure was.

Maybe you have shopped for wine and have been awed at the countless types there are on the shelf. It’s fascinating to see the wide variety of unique wines produced from only a few different types of grapes. So, let’s get into our research of production and consumption.

Countries That Produce The Most Wine

Before we get into the consumption statistics, let’s look at the data for the countries that produce the most wine.

If you have wandered the aisles looking for that perfect bottle, you may not be surprised to find out that Italy, France, and Spain are the top producers in the wine industry.

According to OIV, Italy was the number one wine producer in 2018 with 54.8 million hectoliters of wine. Italy produced over 20% of the 270 million hectoliters estimated total volume of wine produced in 2018.

That is a staggering amount of wine!

Here is a chart that shows the top ten wine-producing countries in descending order.

You probably are not too surprised to know the United States is the one with that leading number. France follows the USA at 26.8 million hectoliters, and Italy comes third at 22.4 million hectoliters.

Here is a chart that shows the top ten wine-consuming countries in descending order.

Rank	Country	Wine Consumption – Sheer Volume (million hl)
1	USA	33.0
2	France	26.8
3	Italy	22.4
4	Germany	20.0
5	China	17.6
6	United Kingdom	12.4
7	Russia	11.9
8	Spain	10.5
9	Argentina	8.4
10	Australia	6.0

Countries That Consume The Most Wine – Per Capita

Now let’s look at the most prominent wine lovers, the country that drinks the most wine on average per person. We are looking at the per capita of wine consumed in the world. This is where our data gets interesting, and I had to do a little digging.

First, I collected the world population from worldometers.info by country and mapped it to the sheer volume of wine consumption. Now we have to do the math, dividing the wine consumption by population number, this gives us the wine consumption per capita, and we can build our new ranking.

It understandably makes sense that the United States has the most consumed wine because the population is much higher than other countries. What happens when we start calculating that by the average person? Well, the United States loses its title of the biggest wine consumer, and it even falls out of the top 10! So, who triumphs?

The Portuguese are the top wine consumers with a total of 53.9 liters per capita. Second is France at 41.1 liters per capita and Italy in third place at 37.0 liters per capita.

Here is a chart that shows the top ten wine-consuming countries per capita in descending order.

Rank	Country	Wine Consumption – Per Capita (Liters/year)
1	Portugal	53.9
2	France	41.1
3	Italy	37.0
4	Switzerland	30.0
5	Croatia	26.8
6	Austria	26.6
7	Belgium	25.9
8	Denmark	25.9
9	Hungary	24.8
10	Germany	23.9

The popularity of Wine by Country

Now that we have looked at wine production and wine consumption, who wins the popularity contest? I used Google trends for an interest-based search on wine.

The results show that the United States barely wins this competition. The second place is going to New Zealand and then Australia. This statistic is based on a scale of 0 to 100 taken from Google Trends, 100 being the most popular.

Here is a chart that shows the wine popularity taken from Google trends.

Rank	Country	Score
1	United States	100
2	New Zealand	97
3	Australia	92
4	South Africa	82
5	Canada	77

There you have it! Depending on how you want to look at it, either the United States or Portugal ranks number one on wine consumption.

The United States takes the lead if you talk about sheer volume, but Portugal stands high above the other countries if you refer to measure per capita.

I hope you found this information helpful or entertaining. I certainly enjoyed researching all about wine consumption.

Research References

1. 2019 Statistical Report on World Vitiviniculture: https://oiv.int/public/medias/6782/oiv-2019-statistical-report-on-world-vitiviniculture.pdf
2. Countries in the world by population: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
3. Google trends on wine search: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=277&date=2019-01-01%202019-12-31&q=wine