Wine is set to overtake beer as Britain’s most-loved alcoholic drink, MailOnline can reveal.
Adults in the UK sink 39 bottles Sauvignon blanc and Merlot on average each year, data shows.
Consumption has soared 12-fold since the 1960s, partly fuelled by higher boozing rates among women.
Beer intake, meanwhile, has more than halved since its heyday five decades ago – from the equivalent of 276 pints a year to 110.
Industry experts today claimed wine’s overthrowing of beer as Britain’s best-loved drink was ‘a long time coming’. Others guessed the booming popularity of spirits might also see beer overtaken again in the near future.
Figures compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO) show how much alcohol is consumed via different drinks.
The typical Briton aged 15 or over consumes 9.75l of pure alcohol each year.
Broken down, this includes 3.55l of alcohol from wine.
For comparison, the figure stood at 0.3l in the early-60s. This amounts to close to three bottles.
As of 2020, the most recent year there are figures for, we consume 3.12l of alcohol from beer.
Wine’s surging popularity is thought, in part, to be due to it becoming much more common for women to drink.
‘In 1970, most alcohol was drunk as beer and in pubs and wine was expensive and not widely available,’ UK charity Alcohol Change notes in the ‘UK trends’ section of its website.
But the growth of the wine sector, it says, means that ‘today we consume most of our units as wine, and mostly in the home’.
A huge industry-wide push means supermarkets are littered with an abundance of wine varieties, with some sold for as little as £3 a bottle.
Wine glasses have also ballooned in size over the years, meaning drinkers consume more without knowing.
Beer consumption, meanwhile, has plunged from 7.85l during the late 1970s to 3.12l in 2020, the most recent figures collated by the WHO.
This is, in part, due to a general decrease in the amount Brits are drinking across the board, as well as the so-called ‘flight to quality’ in replacement of volume drinking.
Additionally, low-no alcohol pints are rapidly expanding their UK footprint.
Bert Blaize, ex-head sommelier at the Michelin-starred restaurant Clove Club in east London and The Mandrake Hotel, said wine supplanting beer at the top is long overdue.
He said: ‘A lot of work has been done by the industry to make wine more accessible. Previously it’s been seen as snobby.
‘I love beer, but wine is a superior product – it can transform you to a different place, country or time and beer cannot do that.’
Mr Blaize added: ‘Maybe women care more about what they are tasting and not just going to the pub and getting tanked up on lager – it’s more over a lunch and having wine on the table.’
Madalena Moreira, of Encirc – a bottler and glass-manufacturing company based in the UK that tests more than 15,000 samples of wine every year, added: ‘Beer is still drunk but we are not in a time where we finish our shift and go to the pub for a beer, it could be a glass of wine or a gin and tonic.’
Spirits, too, have boomed in popularity in recent years, in part driven by the stocking of at-home bars during the pandemic.
In 2020, people in the UK consumed an average of 2.56l of pure alcohol from spirits – the equivalent of 128 double G&Ts. This marked an all-time high, according to the WHO data.
This is compared to the equivalent of 108 double G&Ts in 1990 and 120 in 1979.
At its current trajectory, rum, vodka and gin could overtake beer in both the home bar and out on the town in the coming years.
The NHS recommends people drink no more than 14 ‘units’ of alcohol — around six glasses of wine, or pints of beer — per week.
Drinking too much over a long period raises the risk of high blood pressures, strokes, liver disease, cancers, depression and dementia, they warn.
But leading experts have rowed about the harms of moderate drinking for decades.
Some studies have suggested that a glass of wine or pint of beer a day can stave off a host of illnesses.
