New world wine market compendium
Market Bulletin | Issue 90
Professor Kym Anderson and colleagues at the University of Adelaide have just released Global wine markets 1860–2016: a statistical compendium.
This update to their global wine market compendium published in 2011 is available as a free e-book or a printed version can be ordered. The compendium includes statistics on all world wine markets from vineyard area to wine expenditure, and wine taxes to exchange rates – for around 50 countries.
How patterns are changing
The historical summaries show how patterns of consumption have changed. For example, wine consumption in Hong Kong has increased 40-fold from less than 0.1 litre per year per person in the 1960s to 4 litres per year in 2016, while consumption in Australia increased 4-fold over the same period.
Figure 1 Wine consumption per capita in Asian markets 1960s to 2016 in litres per year
Source: Global Wine Markets 1860 – 2016: a statistical compendium
This increase in consumption has in turn driven increases in production. China’s vineyard area has more than doubled from 422,000 hectares in 2006 to 847,000 hectares in 2016, and China now has the second largest vineyard area[1] in the world after Spain and ahead of France and Italy. Over the same period, the combined vineyard area of Spain, France and Italy declined by 10 per cent.
Every table and chart tells a fascinating story. In Chile, grapes have grown from less than 20 per cent to over 30 per cent of total crop production value since the 1990s, and it is now second only to Portugal (at 35 per cent) in terms of the relatively importance of grapegrowing to the country’s agricultural production. Even more dramatically, grapegrowing now accounts for nearly one quarter of New Zealand’s crop production value, compared with less than 5 per cent in the 1990s. By contrast, in Australia and the USA, two of the world’s top six wine producing countries, grapegrowing accounts for less than 5 per cent of total crop production value and has changed little in the past 20 years (see figure 2).
Figure 2 Share of grapes in gross value of crop production (per cent)
Source: Global Wine Markets 1860 – 2016: a statistical compendium