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Until very recently, most grape-based wine was consumed close to where it was produced, and mostly that was in Europe. Barely one-tenth of the world’s wine production was exported prior to the 1970s, even counting intra-European trade. The latest wave of globalization has changed that forever. Now more than one-third of all wine consumed globally is produced in another country, and Europe’s dominance of global wine trade has been greatly diminished by the surge of exports from ‘New World’ producers. New consumers also have come onto the scene as incomes have grown, eating habits have changed and tastes have broadened. Asia in particular is emerging as a new and rapidly growing wine market – and in China that is stimulating the development of local, modern production capability that, in volume terms, already rivals that of Argentina, Australia and South Africa. This latest edition of global wine statistics therefore not only updates data to 2009 and revises past data, but also expands on earlier editions in a number of ways. For example, we now separately identify an extra eight Asian countries or customs areas (Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand) in addition to China and Japan. We also include more than 50 new tables to cover such items as excise and import taxes, per capita expenditure on wine, the share of domestic sales in off-trade, the shares of the largest firms in national markets and globally, and the most powerful wine brands globally. Given the growing interest in the health aspects of alcohol consumption, we now express it per adult as well as per capita. Perhaps the most significant addition to this latest version is a new section that provides estimates of the volume, value and hence unit value of wine production, consumption, exports and imports for four catagories: sparkling wines, and non-premium, commercial-premium and super-premium still wines.

Until recently, most grape-based wine was consumed close to where it was produced, and mostly that was in Europe. Now more than two-fifths of all wine consumed globally is produced in another country, including in the Southern Hemisphere, the USA and Asia. This latest edition of global wine statistics not only updates data to 2016 but also adds another century of data. The motivation to assemble those historical data was to enable comparisons between the current and the previous globalization waves. This unique database reveals that, even though Europe’s vineyards were devastated by vine diseases and the pest phylloxera from the 1860s, most ‘New World’ countries remained net importers of wine until late in the nineteenth century. Some of the world’s leading wine economists and historians have contributed to and drawn on this database to examine the development of national wine market developments before, during and in between the two waves of globalization. Their initial analyses cover all key wine-producing and -consuming countries using a common methodology to explain long-term trends and cycles in national wine production, consumption, and trade.