"Americans tap wine over beer"

which is pathetic given the vast array of chemicals added to commercial wine.

i'll make my wine with plain grape juice and NO chemicals and leave it at that.

I read the article but did not see anything indicating that people were considering chemicals when they were picking their poison. Maybe I missed something. I wonder about the numbers though, They indicate Americans drink about 24 gallons of beer and 2 gallons of wine per year. I assume they mean for those who drink each, not an average of all Americans or of all drinkers. That would indicate that people who drink beer drink about

235 beers a year while people who drink wine only drink about 50 glasses a year. Wine drinkers must not reach for their alcohol of choice very often. I certainly do more than my share by those standards.

Ray

50 glasses a year? That's less than one per week. I would guess that that's the average for all Americans, not just wine drinkers.

From

"Per capita wine consumption in the United States in 1995 was: 2.13 gallons/adult"

which is close to your 2 gallons per year and for all adults, not just wine drinkers. Of course, the average (mean) is more meaningful if you have the standard deviation of the distribution. There's a lot of good statistical information about wine consumption at

49&context=ucscecon Table 2 gives the average and standard deviation of wine share but I'll have to read this a few more times while sober to fully understand it. I cross-posted to alt.sci.math.probability and sci.stat.math to see if any of the stat wizards there could read anything into this. It looks like the US-Canada share is increasing while the standard deviation as a ratio to mean is decreasing, indicating a tightening up of the wine consumption trends. (I really like the wine consumption by latitude graphs.)

Another interesting fact from that site:

"The approximate ratio of beer advertising to wine advertising is: 10 to 1"

Which is in the neighborhood of your 24 gallons of beer to 2 gallons of wine per year, or 12-1. It looks like it pays to advertise.

Paul