Britain’s favourite wines of the past 5 years
We’ve come a long way since the days when claret was all. The above illustration shows how our taste for different grape varieties has changed. Each bottle represents 230,000 cases of wine sold, so in 2008 - shown in the right-most rack - we guzzled just under 34 million cases made from the grapes we’ve looked at. Pinot Grigio has been the star performer among whites, but Sauvignon Blanc has had a good run too, bolstered by the output from the Marlborough region of New Zealand. Among reds, Merlot’s rise notable - thanks in part to the growing Chilean market, and the wine having carved out a niche as ‘the red you can drink when you’re not eating’. It’s worth pointing out that any attempt to categorize wine by grape is fraught. The above data, which accounts for 80 per cent of all sales in the UK, includes only wines sold under exactly that name. So ’shiraz’, above, does not include wines labelled ’syrah’ - the French name for the same grape, not does it include Cotes du Rhone, much of which would contain shiraz, nor blends of shiraz. Still, more than 50 per cent of the wine sold in the UK is made from single varietals. Among them tempranillo, which, when it comes from Spain, we tend to know better as its place of origin: Rioja.
(Source: Nielsen)
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