You don’t need to sleep atop a futon made of discarded box wine containers and knockoff concert tees to know that young peeps drink a lot. That being said, a recently released report says young drinkers are actually in a league unto themselves.
According to a report on the US wine market conducted by the Wine Market Council, young people in their 20s and early-to-mid 30s now drink almost half the wine bought in the US. And, get this: among high-frequency wine drinkers under the age of 30, women are out-purchasing men two-to-one when it comes to wine.
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According to Wine Spectator, the report also says that the wine that Millennials are drinking is not their parents’ wine: it is from more diverse regions, it’s more expensive, and it is more likely to be sustainable and organic.
Defining Millennials as those born between 1978 and 1995, the report says that now that the youngest are 21 years of age, the generation’s wine-drinking is, so to speak, in full bloom. As a group, Millennials drank 159.6 million cases of wine in 2015. That’s more than any other generation and constitutes 42 percent of all of the wine consumed in the US last year.
In other words, that’s a lot of wine.
The report says 30 percent of Millennials have joined the class of wine drinkers known as “high-frequency” drinkers—those who consume wine several times a week. Baby Boomers account for the largest group in the high-frequency class, but Millennials are right behind them, making up 30 percent of frequent drinkers.
Talk about a battle of the generations. Now if only we could settle which age group makes the dankest beer luges, we’d have shit pretty much covered.
Millennials also have a taste for the good stuff. The survey found that 17 percent bought a bottle costing over $20 in the past month. Neither Gen X nor the Baby Boomers came close to that kind of spending.
What kind of wine are Millennials drinking? All kinds, says the report. That’s the thing: as a generation, their tastes are eclectic.
Perhaps the most interesting finding of the report is this: although women make up a slightly larger share of wine-purchasers across generations, the gender gap among Millennials—especially the younger ones—is huge: two-thirds of high-frequency wine drinkers under 30 years old in 2015 were women. Among Millennials in their thirties, the gender split is even.
A study by Nielsen says that Millennial women are more likely than older women to consider themselves “highly involved” in wine.
So if you are in the wine business, it’s the young women who are your best customers. Bottoms up, ladies.