Pumpkin Pie Chart: Thanksgiving by the Numbers
After all the fretting about what wine to drink with Thanksgiving Dinner, we have objective data showing what people actually drank. Via the invaluable Dr. Vino, we have Cellartracker’s report on what people pulled out of the basement to put on the table. The list sorts by brand, and the Top Five are: Turley, Louis Roederer, Marcassin, Seghesio Family Vineyards, and Kistler.
Digging into the underlying varietal data yields moderate insight and the following colorful chart:
In percentage terms, 31% drank Pinot Noir, 28% Zinfandel, 14% Champagne, and 13% defaulted to the wine preferance of the unimaginative, Chardonnay. There was a surprisingly strong showing (almost 3%) by Arneis, an apparently increasingly fashionable white that originated in Piedmont but is gaining some traction in Oregon.
What does all this mean? Good question!
UPDATE: Commentor Wine Stalker correctly points out that the Cellartracker data sample is skewed since most people don’t record their wine drinking on the site. If the data represented a more realistic slice of the general population, according to Wine Stalker, White Zinfandel would figure a lot more prominently on the list. Wine Stalker is both correct and missing my admittedly inarticulately articulated point.
The self-selected users of Cellartracker are, it’s safe to assume, more likely than the general population to be the kind of people who pay attention to matching food and wine. (Except, of course, for the Chardonnay drinkers. They’re just pulling the first thing they can think of off the shelf.) The brands they’ve chosen indicate that they’re willing pay a lot of money to serve what they think is just the right wine.
The value is not the brand information — I personally, would not waste a bottle Kosta Browne on the kind of deadbeats who show up at my family’s Thanksgiving table — but in the varietal information. When people on a $15 budget go out looking for Thanksgiving wine, what they’re sweating more than anything is choice of grape. Here, in a color palette right out of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” period, they have an answer.
December 1st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
This (unobjective) data means practically nothing, other than an interesting sample of 8k bottles were supposedly consumed by Cellartracker customers.
Do we really think Turley and Kistler were consumed by anyone else besides enthusiasts and afficionados? If we did a random sample of 8k U.S. consumers, it wouldn’t even come close to looking like the pie chart above. Top on the list would be white zinfandel. And after that, at least 4k would not drank wine at all. LOL.