How Much Wine is Bought Per Day?

As you crack open yet another bottle of Italian wine, you might start to wonder just how many of those bottles you get through every year. Perhaps you know that you drink a bottle every couple of days. For you, that would mean about 180 bottles per year.

It’s a lot, isn’t it?

But let’s take that half a bottle per day and build on the figure.

Imagine if every person in the world bought the same amount of Italian wine as you do. That would be 8 billion people drinking half a bottle per day. In other words, 4 billion bottles per day!

Of course, that’s an extremely unrealistic number.

Still, it brings us to an interesting question:

How much wine is bought per day?

We decided that we wanted to find out. So, get ready for a stat-heavy article that explores the answer to how much wine is bought per day.

The Global Picture

Let’s start with the entire world.

According to Statista, the global wine industry produced 234 million hectolitres of wine in 2020. If we work our way through the figures over the last 20 years, we see they stay pretty consistent with that number. In 2000, the product was 226 million hectolitres per year. It also hit a peak of 250 million in 2007 and 2008. So, 238 million is actually a pretty good mid-point number for the last two decades of wine production.

So, how does that figure help us?

To answer that, we need to know what a hectolitre is.

One hectolitre is the equivalent of 100 litres of wine. The average bottle contains 0.75 litres. So, if we divide 100 by 0.75, we get 133.3 bottles of wine per hectolitre.

Now, we can figure out how many bottles of wine are produced per year.

We take our 238 million and multiply it by 133.3. After all, we know that one hectolitre is 133.3 bottles of wine.

The result is 31,725,400,000 bottles of wine produced by the global wine industry every single year, assuming every single bottle is a standard 0.75 litres. Of course, that figure may not be completely accurate as it doesn’t take magnums and other larger bottles into account. It also doesn’t account for smaller bottles of wine. Still, it’s a decent average to work with.

So, we have over 31.7 billion bottles of wine produced per year.

Now, we just need to do a little more maths.

We take that 31.7 billion and divide it by 365.

That gives us 86,918,904 bottles of wine per day being consumed by the global population.

That is a crazy figure. But if it seems a little high, just think that this takes in all 8 billion of the world’s population. Even if we take away all of the people who aren’t of drinking age, 86.9 million bottles of wine per day is not a crazy sum. After all, China alone has 1.4 billion people. To hit that 86.9 million figure, it would only take roughly 6% of the country’s population to drink a bottle of wine per day. Spread the number across the entire world and it suddenly starts to seem like 86.9 million is a touch on the small side.

Still, that’s what the maths shows us. The Earth’s population gets through a huge volume of wine per day. And producers generate so much wine that it is almost unfathomable. After all, can you imagine what 31.7 billion bottles of wine would look like?

Now, let’s break it down a little.

Which Country Drinks the Most Wine Per Day?

This is a more difficult question to answer because the figures aren’t as readily available as those for global wine consumption. However, we have a few that we can work from to give you a general idea of what some countries drink.

Let’s start with the United States.

In 2021, Americans drank 33.1 million hectolitres of wine. That’s about 15% of global wine production, which is a pretty big figure. If we multiply that number by 133.3, we get 4,412,230,000 bottles of wine consumed in America per year.

Divide that by 365 and we land on 12,088,301 per day.

Again, that seems high. But if we consider that the USA has a population of about 330 million people, it suddenly starts seeming much more realistic. It works out to about 0.03 bottles of wine per person per day, which is barely a sip!

Let’s look a little closer to home.

Italy consumes 24.2 million hectolitres per year. If we do our maths and multiply that by 133.3, we get 3,225,860,000 bottles per year. Divide that by 365 and we land on 8,837,972 million bottles of wine per day.

So, Italy consumes over 3 million bottles of wine fewer than the United States per day.

That seems surprising, at first. But remember that Italy has a much smaller population than the USA. In 2020, the country’s population was measured to be about 59.55 million people.

So, let’s do the maths again.

8,837,972 divided by 59.55 million brings us to 0.15 bottles of wine per person per day. That’s five times more than the per day per person figure for the United States! So, Italy definitely has the edge on wine consumption, as Italians essentially drink a small glass of wine per person per day.

Let’s do one last set of sums to figure out how many bottles the Italian wine industry produces.

In 2020, the country produced 5.6 billion litres of wine. If we divide that by 100, we get 56 million hectolitres. Multiply that by 133.3 and we get 7,464,800,000 bottles of wine produced in Italy every year.

Finally, we divide that number by 365 and get 20,451,506 bottles of wine per day.

So, Italy produces almost 2.5 times more wine per day than its people consume. And that just goes to show us how much demand exists for Italian wine throughout the world.

The Final Word

This was a fun little maths exercise. But now, let’s get down to the serious business of drinking Italian wine. You’re ready to contribute to these figures, which means you need to get your hands on a bottle or three of wine. That’s where we come in. Xtrawine’s extensive collection ensures we have a wine for every single occasion. Explore today and we’re sure you’ll find a wine to suit your needs.