What makes a wine popular? Is it the vineyard’s terroir and the winemaker’s skill? Or, does it take a beautiful label and clever marketing? Those would be safe bets, but Vivino's data tells us a different story. Find out what it takes to be a wine superstar in the United States today based on consumption and preference data from our five million American users and their 86,429 daily scans.

Since 2010, wine drinkers in the United States have consumed more wine than any other nation in the world (Wine Institute, 2015) which means knowing how to please a standard American palate is key to succeeding as a wine producer today.

Vivino Wine Specialist and WSET Level 3 Certified Anna Toro says, “As a Vivino team member who is absolutely obsessed with data, I’ve been curious to know how the most popular wines got so big and what these wines have in common that makes them such people-pleasers.”

To kick off the research right, Anna began with a glass of wine. She sat down with Vivino’s most popular wine, Apothic Red, to find out what it is about the wine that makes our community of wine lovers consume so many bottles in the first place and why they reach for them again and again.





The Top List

















What do these wines have in common that makes them so popular? Vivino's data reveals their secrets.

The Magic Price Range

According to the Wine Institute , in 2015, Americans drank 2.84 gallons of wine per person (up from 2.01 gallons each in 2000), and they don’t seem to be saving it for special occasions. How can we tell? The reasonable prices.

Wine professor Dr. Liz Thach , Master of Wine, says the general trend has been for consumers to “buy up”—spend more on a bottle than they did the year before. The average bottle price was only scratching $10 in 2016. All of Vivino’s top five most popular wines are affordable, readily available reds that sell for between $10 and $22. Wine budgets may be going up, but most of what Americans drink is an affordable indulgence.







Wine For The American Palate

What do Americans want wine to taste like? When you look at Vivino reviews for the top five, you see these words over and over again:

Smooth

Fruit/Fruity

Sweet

Cherry

Rich

Balanced

Oak

Chocolate

Vanilla

A sweet, smooth cherry-vanilla flavor is one people love.This style is a part of “ radical reds ” trends dominating the US wine market right now. Matt Kramer described radical reds as “intensely fruity, big-scale reds that amplify their fruitiness by retaining a noticeable residual sugar”.

You’re reading that correctly—though these aren’t dessert wines, many aren’t bone dry, either. For example, Apothic Red has 15 grams sugar/liter and Meiomi has 6.9. Slightly sweet reds are proving to be a good way to get Americans hooked.

Aspirational Marketing

How wine tastes is crucial, but don’t discount the importance of how it makes a consumer feel. These most popular wines are all intended to make the American buyer feel classy, sophisticated, and European (even if the wine itself isn’t from Europe).

Apothic Red has a luxe, red-and-black label, and the brand’s name is inspired by “Apotheca” where wine was blended in 13th C Europe. Catena Zapata Cantena Malbec goes the other way with a chic minimalist label, but it also emphasizes history, noting that the winery was founded in 1902. For Meiomi, even the Pinot Noir grape itself helps. It has carried an aura of “fancier than Merlot” ever since the movie Sideways came out in 2004.

Marqués De Riscal and Casillero Del Diablo both employ a powerful wine marketing term: Reserva. For Spanish wines like the Marqués De Riscal, Reserva means it was aged for a minimum of 3 years, with at least one year in casks. In the US, the word has no legal definition, so American consumers just associate it with a higher level of Old World care, craftsmanship, and class.

Widely Available

A wine that’s hard to find can be legendary, but it can’t be popular unless you can find it. The top five are all owned by large producers and and made in huge quantities. You can buy them in just about every wine shop or supermarket. Consumers are drinking these bottles regularly and forming a relationship with the brand, catapulting them to the list of most-sold wines.

Vintage Consistency

According to Vivino’s data, another thing all these most most-sold wines have in common is consistency from vintage to vintage. The year the grapes were grown is less important than the way the wines emphasize a continuity of the style. Rarely is there a “good year” or “bad year”. This translates into Vivino ratings that change very little, as you can see for Casillero Del Diablo Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon below. These wines are always a safe bet.

It’s easy to see why these these particular wines end up being the most sold and scanned. It’s a perfect formula: make a wine that’s carefully calibrated to your audience’s taste and budget, ensure vintage consistency, produce a tremendous amount so everyone can buy some, put it in supermarkets, large wine stores, and online distributors, then use a label on it that makes makes the drinker feel classy and sophisticated. American wine drinkers agree—if you do this, they’re obsessed!

