3.4 litres per person. That’s how much wine is made in the world. A back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much wine is made per person in the major wine producing countries can give us a rough proxy for how important wine is for a country’s economy. Spain, Italy and France are, unsurprisingly, on the top of that ranking as the countries where wine production is most important to the economy. More surprising is perhaps that the fourth country on the list is New Zealand. Equally surprising is (perhaps) that Germany is far down the list. Here’s the full analysis.
Read all our articles in the Wine Global 2020 series here:
- Global wine production 2020
- The World’s vineyard surface 2020
- How important is wine production to a country?
- The world’s most productive wine producing countries
- World wine consumption in 2020
- Wine consumption per person in 2020
- World wine exports in 2020
- World wine imports in 2020
- Wine exports compared to total production (dependency on exports)
- Wine exports compared to GDP and to total exports
- Average price per litre on export, by country
- Exports in bottle, sparkling, bag-in-box, bulk in 2020
Which country makes most wine per capita
The world as a whole makde 3.4 litre of wine per person in 2020, a surprisingly high number, considering that the majority of people on earth do not drink wine.
NB: all numbers on wine production is from 2020.
One way of looking at the comparison of wine production per capita is as an indication of how important the wine industry is for the economy of the country. It would be interesting to compare the value of the wine produced by each country to the country’s GDP. That would be an even better indication of how important wine is to a country. But I have not found a good source for the national value of wine production. So production per capita will have to do as a proxy.
Spain makes the most wine per capita, 86 litres for each Spaniard. However, as you will see in the following articles on wine consumption and on world trade in wine they are not that keen on drinking all this wine that they produce.
The other two of the Big Three, Italy and France, follow with 82 litres produced per person for Italy, and a bit further back with 69 litres per capita for France.
In fourth place we have New Zealand that makes 65 litres of wine per person, almost as much as France. But they are even less keen than the Spanish to drink their own wines, as you will see in the following articles.
China, Brazil, Russia and the USA are at the very bottom of the ranking of wine produced per capita. Not surprising either with their large populations. It also shows that although the US is the biggest wine consumer, the biggest market for wine, wine is not that important from an economic viewpoint for the country.
Also Germany, although it is a very famous wine country, makes very little wine per person, only 10 litres.
There are various other estimates of the importance of the “wine sector” to national economies. For example, Statista says that the wine market had revenues of 50 billion USD in 2020, with France in second place with 25 billion USD (they estimate the global wine market to $ 341 bn). Wine America, on the other hand, estimates that the US wine market contributes $220 bn to the economy (2017). In Australia the wine sector is estimated to contribute 46 billion AU dollars each year according to AgEconPlus/Wine Australia. These numbers often include many other activities than the actual wine production, e.g. (wine) tourism, retail etc and vary much depending on the source.
So, for the moment I will stick to production volume and population for the comparison of how important wine is to a country’s economy. Here’s the top list ranking.
Wine production per country per person, world-wide
| # vol rank | Country | Prod M hl 2020 | Population (million) | Prod per capita, litre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Italy | 49.1 | 59.6 | 82 |
| 2 | France | 46.6 | 67.4 | 69 |
| 3 | Spain | 40.7 | 47.4 | 86 |
| 4 | USA # | 22.8 | 329.5 | 7 |
| 5 | Argentina | 10.8 | 45.3 | 24 |
| 6 | Australia | 10.6 | 25.7 | 41 |
| 7 | South Africa | 10.4 | 59.3 | 18 |
| 8 | Chile | 10.3 | 19.1 | 54 |
| 9 | Germany | 8.4 | 83.2 | 10 |
| 10 | China # | 6.6 | 1402.1 | 0 |
| 11 | Portugal | 6.4 | 10.3 | 62 |
| 12 | Russia | 4.4 | 144.1 | 3 |
| 13 | Romania | 3.6 | 19.3 | 19 |
| 14 | New Zealand | 3.3 | 5.1 | 65 |
| 15 | Hungary | 2.4 | 9.7 | 25 |
| 16 | Austria | 2.4 | 8.9 | 27 |
| 17 | Greece | 2.3 | 10.7 | 21 |
| 18 | Brazil | 1.9 | 212.6 | 1 |
| 19 | Georgia | 1.8 | 3.7 | 49 |
| 98 | Other countries | 15.4 | ||
| 99 | World total | 260 | 7752.8 | 3.4 |
# vol indicates ranking in volume, except 98 and 99 that are just there for sorting purposes.
Note: You can sort the table by column.
Important: This table only includes the biggest wine producing countries. There are smaller wine producing countries where wine is a very important national source of income, for example Moldova.
Population numbers come from https://data.worldbank.org.
All data comes from the OIV, International Organisation of Vine and Wine, unless otherwise specified.
An update on Moldova
An update on Moldova, as that question has been asked by several people:
That Moldova is not on the list above is probably due to that the total production is so little that it falls below the OIV cut-off point.
Moldova made about 1.2 Mhl of wine in 2020 (a figure that has fallen sharply in recent years, for various reasons). That is a figure with great uncertainty, however. In reality, it is probably higher, considering that there is a lot of unregistered production. We have the same problem with the number of inhabitants. One third of the country’s inhabitants are said live outside the country. Should they be counted or not? But let’s take the number of 2.6 million inhabitants (according to Wikipedia the official figure 2021).
Then Moldova produces 46.2 litres per person.
It places Moldova in (updated, 24-01-26) third place in the world rankings, after Italy and France not sure what I did with my maths here, but 46.7 l places Moldova in 8th place between Georgia and Australia. A couple of years ago, Moldova made almost 2 Mhl; 1.9 Mhl 2018 at most. If we take that figure instead, Moldova will reach a total of 73 litres per person and would then probably have been the country with the most wine production per capita, even though Italy and France also had larger production that year. However, as mentioned, Moldovan statistics have a lot of uncertainties.
(If you are interested in Moldova, we have written a whole series of articles about the wine country of Moldova here.)
