You'd be forgiven for thinking that everything had changed in the wake of the Covid pandemic and that nothing would ever be the same again. You'd also be dead wrong.
Sure, there have been big changes in how we live, how we work and even how we relax since the virulent little bugger went global earlier this year, but one thing it hasn't really changed is how we drink wine – and spirits, for that matter.
Despite the huge upheavals in the wine world since March, and the countless breathless news stories telling us about the "new normal", what people are looking for hasn't really changed. Yes, the shift to ordering and buying online has been a big shift, and the closure of many places where people could previously gather socially has significantly changed consumption habits, but there has been very little change in what people are looking for on Wine-Searcher.
Taking a snapshot of life before the pandemic and life during it shows very little change at all in the search habits of our millions of daily users. We compared search data for the first three months of this year with the months May-July and the differences are slight to say the least.
Take a look at the grape varieties and spirit types that were in vogue at the start of the year, for example. The 10 most searched-for varieties and spirits were, in order, Bordeaux blends reds, Pinot Noir, Cabernet, Chardonnay, blended whiskey, malt whiskey, Champagne blend, Nebbiolo, Bourbon and Sangiovese. Turn to the May-July figures and the only change is that Chardonnay has leapfrogged Cabernet (which is more likely a seasonal phenomenon anyway), malts have overtaken blends and Sangiovese has beaten Bourbon by a nose.
Even outside the top 10, there isn't much movement – the biggest movers in the top 20 are brandy and Merlot, which respectively fell and rose two places.
Regionally, there is a little more movement, but it's still pretty predictable. In the first three months of the year, the most searched-for regions were Napa, Scotland, Pauillac, Champagne, Kentucky, India, Saint-Émilion, Barolo, the broader California designation, and the Toscana IGT, home to the Super Tuscans.
By July, Scotland had fallen three places, Kentucky had risen to fourth and Margaux had displaced California. So, some movement, but not a great deal. In fact, the most interesting thing about the list of most searched-for regions is the discovery that products from the Highlands region of Scotland had more searches than products labeled Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Bordeaux or Bolgheri.
Picking the winners
When it comes to producers, the latter months have seen wine reassert itself, to some degree. The producers with the most searched-for products across their entire range were rather more whiskey-dominated at the start of the year. The top 10 was Johnnie Walker, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Dom Pérignon, Buffalo Trace, The Macallan, Château Mouton Rothschild, Château Lafite Rothschild, Penfolds, Château Margaux and McDowell's, an Indian whiskey distillery. By July, the top 10 looked like this: DRC, Dom Pérignon, Mouton, Johnnie Walker, Lafite, Buffalo Trace, Macallan, Margaux and Latour.
What's impressive among that bunch is that individual châteaux like Mouton and Lafite effectively produce a single product – the non-grand vin searches for each producer are negligible – while Johnnie Walker and Buffalo Trace turn out a bewildering array of labels.
What's also interesting is the fall-off in interest in Johnnie Walker. At the start of the year, it's products were attracting big search-traffic numbers, but by the end of July that traffic had almost halved and was still heading downwards. In July, the number of searches the Johnnie Walker brand attracted was less than one-seventh of what it had achieved across the first quarter of the year.
Perhaps the boost that spirits got at the start of the pandemic is fading as we become more inured to living with Covid, because the march of last year's success story has also been brought to a halt. Blanton's, the Bourbon that ate the world back in 2019, had a sobering outcome – it slipped nine places in the search rankings with a drop in search traffic of 30 percent.
Who knows? Maybe things really have changed after all.
August 31, 2020 at 07:01AM
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Has Covid Affected our Wine Habits? - Wine-Searcher
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