The World’s Biggest Wine Drinkers Have Been Revealed—and It’s Not France or Italy

Over 210 million hectoliters of wine (equivalent to a staggering 4.7 billion gallons) are drunk around the world every year. As immense as that figure may be, though, wine consumption has actually been falling globally in recent years, and we’re now drinking less wine than we have in more than six decades. 

In some countries, however, wine remains as popular as ever, and now a fascinating new study by Visual Capitalist has produced an infographic to show precisely where the world’s biggest wine drinkers are located.

At the top of the list in the latest data, Portugal has emerged as the world’s largest consumer of wine, with an average annual wine consumption per capita of 61.1 liters (13.4 gallons). That figure puts mainland Europe’s westernmost nation comfortably ahead of the rest of the world, with second-place Italy (42.7 liters, 9.4 gallons) a full 18.4 liters behind it. 

Coming in third, meanwhile, is France with 41.5 liters (9.1 gallons), followed by Switzerland in fourth (29.7 liters, 6.5 gallons), and Austria in fifth (28.6 liters, 6.3 gallons).

In fact, all but one of the top 10 nations in the study is located in western Europe: only Australia in sixth place with 24.5 liters (5.3 gallons) bucked that trend, with the remainder of the top of the list made up of Germany in seventh (24.5 liters, 5.3 gallons), Hungary in eighth (24.4 liters, 5.3 gallons), Spain in ninth (23.8 liters, 5.2 gallons) and the UK in tenth (22.3 liters, 4.9 gallons). 

See the full top 10 list:

The study points out that Portugal’s place at the top of the global rankings is likely at least in part due to the country’s high wine-production output, and relatively low value-added tax, or VAT, on still wine of just 13%—the lowest such tax figure in the entire European Union. 

As for the United States, the study’s authors also point out that the entire average annual wine consumption per head in the US (11.8 liters, 2.6 gallons) is equal to the difference between the wine consumption of third-place France (41.5 liters) and fourth-place Switzerland (29.7 liters).

In fact, showing how relatively little wine is drunk outside of Europe, Canada too only fared a little better than the U.S., with an average of 13.7 liters (3 gallons), while the likes of Japan (2.8 liters, 0.6 gallons), Brazil (1.9 liters, 0.4 gallons), and China (0.5 liters, 0.1 gallons) all found themselves among the countries at the very bottom of the world rankings. 

For more on this study and the data involved in it, head to the Visual Capital blog page here.

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