Women lead the way in Australian wine consumption

02-Mar-2016 - Last updated on 02-Mar-2016 at 08:08 GMT

Long considered beer guzzlers, Australians are actually more partial to wine, due largely to the number of women who are partial to a glass of the grape.

According to Roy Morgan Research, 37.6% of adults drank beer each month last year, compared to 45.1% who drank wine.

In 2015, 4.6m Australian women—or 49.0% of the adult female population—would regularly drink either red, white, sparkling or fortified wine, compared to 3.7m of men (41.2%).

White wine, consumed by 69.3% of female wine drinkers, was most popular, followed by red (56.3%), sparkling (42.3%) and fortified (9.3%). Those partial to red, white and sparkling accounted for 18.4% of female wine drinkers.

On the other hand, male wine drinkers are more likely to drink red wine (78.1%) than white (58.4%). They are also dramatically less likely than women to drink sparkling wine (24.6%), much more likely to drink fortified wine (15.4%) and somewhat less likely to drink red, white and sparkling (15.6%) in an average month.

Beer remains the clear favourite among Australian men, consumed by 58.1% of them in any given month.

Number of glasses of wine consumed per average 4 weeks — Number of glasses of wine consumed per average month

Although women far outnumber men when it comes to wine-drinking incidence, the volume each gender consumes is fairly similar. Two-thirds of female wine drinkers and nearly 63% of their male counterparts report consuming less than 15 glasses of wine per month.

Even among those drinkers consuming more than 43 glasses of wine over the same period, the difference between men (10.6%) and women (7.5%) is not as large as one might expect.

“While the proportion of women who drink wine has fallen slightly over the last decade, from 51.8% to 49%, the decrease in male wine drinkers has been much more marked (from 48.1% to 41.2%),” said Andrew Price of Roy Morgan Research.

“There is frequently a social dimension to Aussie women’s wine-drinking: over 45% consume it in a licensed venue, and nearly 41% drink it at friends’ or relatives’ homes. By contrast, 34.6% of male wine-drinkers consume it ‘on premises’, and 32.5% do so at friends’/relatives’ homes.

“Not surprisingly, however, the comfort of home is the most popular place to enjoy a vino, for male and female drinkers alike (85.5% and 80.3% respectively).”