Wine Imports & Exports: 20007

We have all heard how wine consumption in the U.S. has risen. I previously posted about this wine consumption increase, noting how the average person drinks only about 14 bottles of wine a year. Some more specific statistics have now been published.

The Press Democrat has published a new article giving more details. In 2007, the U.S. purchased 314 million cases of wine, up 4% from the prior year. How does this break down between domestic and imported wines?

California wines are still #1, selling about 192 million cases or roughly 60% of the total amount of wines. But their sales only increased 2% since 2006. So there has been slow growth. Sales of wines from other states increased 3%, a total of 25 million cases. The largest growth though was in imported wines, which increased 9% from 2006.

The article states that one of the primary reasons for the increased number of import sales may be the willingness of millenials to experiment with imported wines. For millenials, 4 out of 10 of their wine purchases were imports. This obviously indicates that domestic wines need to target more of their marketing toward millenials, to give them reasons to drink domestic rather than imported wines.

Interestingly, U.S. wineries exported about 18 million cases, mostly to Europe. This is an increase but still less than 10% of the wines produced in the U.S. It seems like the U.S. could do more to market and sell their wines overseas.