The United States is both one of the world’s largest consumers and producers of wine, yet most of the wine we produce here never makes it past our nation’s borders (and of course the three-tier system doesn’t make it easy to ship wine over state borders either). While we keep most of our wine to ourselves, we did let roughly 383 million liters go last year. And where did that wine go? In 2013, 125 different countries imported American wine, which is more than half of the planet’s sovereign states.
While we import and consume quite a bit of wine, our ‘special’ friends across the pond in the UK have been teaching the rest of the world how to import wine for centuries, and they continue to do so today. They’re a people who love wine but they live in a land whose climate doesn’t love our favorite vine; no wonder historians estimate that a scant 22 countries have avoided a British invasion…maybe it was wine they were secretly after!
What we call Bordeaux, the Brits call Claret, and they were importing unfathomable quantities of the stuff long before they even knew North America existed. Fast forward to today: the wine industry is truly global, but, playing their historic role, the UK is by most measures still the world’s largest importer of wine. And when it comes to American wine, they’re our biggest fans. Of the 383 million liters of wine we exported last year, the Brits soaked up nearly a third of it. The vast majority of the balance went to a handful of countries in Europe, Asia, and our immediate neighbors to the north and south. Take a look at the map to see where all that wine went, and scroll below for all the data.
Want to know who is drinking our beer? We’ve got a map for that too!
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The Raw Data
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