U.S. wine market research and insights

Over the past year, several reputable sources have reported declines in U.S. wine sales. SipSource depletion data shows wine sales down year-over-year and Nielsen IQs multi-channel scan data shows retail sales for table wine down 4.5% in volume and 1% in value vs. year ago, for the 52 weeks ending 7/1/2023. This downtrend has been present for over two years, although some price segments and wine types have bucked it.

Wine Market Council is in the midst of a major research project to determine what is causing this, and identifying solutions the wine industry can take to resolve these issues. We have titled the new research project, the ‘Wine Category Shifting Study,’ and it is organized into two phases.

The first phase consisted of a quantitative analysis using Nielsen IQ’s Homescan Panel. The panel consists of over 100,000 households who track their take-home purchases from any store (or delivery) using smart phones or home scanning devices. The methodology allows Nielsen to match actual purchases over time with household demographics.

Regular wine consuming households were defined as those purchasing wine 6+ times a year. They are responsible for the vast majority of wine purchases in the panel, so the initial analysis focused on them.

During the two years ending in April 2023, nearly 1 in 10 Regular wine purchasers dropped out of regular wine purchasing (mostly becoming occasional wine purchasers e.g. 2-5 times a year). About 15% of occasional & 1-time purchasers didn’t purchase wine at all in 52 weeks ending in April 2023.

Many of those dropping out of regular wine purchases cut back on alcohol purchases generally, although some of that may be due to channel shift during 2022 to early 2023 as people continued to return to restaurants, bars and other on-premise venues.

While this reduced the total volume of wine purchased, those households that remained regular wine buyers increased their frequency of purchase, although this was partially offset by smaller quantities per occasion. Furthermore, regular buyers net traded down, with $10-20 wines in particular picking up volume from $20+ wine.

Thursday, December 14, 2023
10:00AM (Pacific Time)

Recent Research on High-End Consumers

We are wrapping up the second big ad hoc research project for 2023, on the state of High-End wine consumers (those who purchase $20+ wines on a regular basis). This research, which comprised both qualitative and quantitative methods, was focused on how such consumers learn about and choose $20+ wines, what they feel wines over $20 ($30, $50…) provide that less expensive wines do not, what is behind the recent reversal of sales growth and whether it seems to be a temporary blip or a turning point of some kind.

Please join us and our research partner for the project Darcen Esau, co-owner of Terroir Consulting (www.terroirwine.ca), for a webinar presenting and discussing some of the highlights of this research.

A question-and-answer session will follow the presentations.

Email Sherri Fidel at admin@winemarketcouncil.com for a link to register for the webinar.