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01.22.2011

Results from the 2011 Vinography Reader Survey

First of all, thank you to all of you who bothered to fill out my online survey. It was a huge help. Six of you won tickets to the ZAP Zinfandel festival. I've sent you e-mails individually, so please check your inboxes and your spam bins (the subject line that includes the words "won tickets" might not look so healthy to your e-mail server). For the rest of you, I hope you go to the festival anyway, as it's a rollicking good time.

The results from the survey range from expected, to interesting, to fairly surprising. Here's what I learned about all you readers, assuming those who answered are a representative sample of y'all.

The majority of you readers are over thirty.

You're mostly male.

You tend to be married or divorced.

You tend to be pretty highly educated.

Your average household income is somewhere between $140,000 and $200,000 per year.

You generally consider yourselves to have an intermediate level of wine knowledge, though a good chunk of you are experts.

Overwhelmingly you characterize yourselves as wine geeks, wine addicts, or wine lovers, though almost half of you are also in the wine business or some related field like hospitality, marketing, or PR. That's quite a high percentage of non-consumers.

When you're not reading vinography, most of you (more than 60%) read other wine blogs, and you tend to favor the Wine Spectator when it comes to things written on dead trees:

I'm very pleased to see that you drink a LOT of wine:

I'm also surprised to see how much wine you buy a year (a hell of a lot more than me):

And you generally tend to own or store a lot of wine. On average, somewhere between 200 and 500 bottles of wine.

You tend to pay between $16 and $35 per bottle when you buy wine.

Some of the other interesting tidbits that emerged from the results include the fact that 65% of you go to wine blogs as one of your sources for advice on what wines to buy. 16% of you have some sort of certified wine education. 22% of you are on more than 5 winery mailing lists (to buy wine) and 28% of you participate in some sort of monthly wine club.

A full 40% of you read no other wine blogs except Vinography, which is sort of a shocking figure to me. 40% of you have also never bought a wine that I've reviewed or recommended.

Posted by: Alder on January 22, 2011 6:01 PM: Tweet; Share this post elsewhere: Digg it! - Add to del.icio.us - Add to Stumbleupon - Add to Reddit; Filed under: Ramblings and Rants

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Comments (8)

doug wrote:

01.23.11 at 1:41 PM

Very interesting and thank you for sharing !! Over 10k bottles, OMG

Jim Sullivan wrote:

01.23.11 at 4:15 PM

Great information, Alder. Thank you.

Mark wrote:

01.24.11 at 9:33 AM

Alder...I think those stats are going to make you immensely popular with advertisers, especially given 15% of your readers are really hitting the sweet spot when it comes to winery sales ($35+ per bottle)

Gary "Iron" Chevsky wrote:

01.25.11 at 8:57 AM

Seems like many of us in the wine press are reading each other's blogs. Kudos to you for the 40% non-overlapping audience - it would suggest that you are more mainstream than most. On the other hand, your demographic is heavily skewed toward significant wine buyers (excellent comment above, regarding the attractiveness of your site to advertisers). But perhaps it's also an indicator of how much/little you link to other blogs in your posts? But the consumers are all generally somewhere else - frankly, not reading any of it - probably watching Gary Vee at best, and the rest are watching the prime time TV where wine is nowhere to be found (unlike Japanese mainstream wine drama Kami No Shizuku), and are shopping at Trader Joe's for $6/btl wines with animal labels.

Sadia Komal wrote:

01.28.11 at 10:24 AM

thank you alder for great information :)

BaroloDude wrote:

01.31.11 at 2:22 PM

How many respondents to the survey? Just curious. (N= ?)

Eric V. Orange wrote:

02.02.11 at 5:30 AM

I find it interesting that your gender stats are almost exactly the opposite of ours. Most of the other results, e.g., education, income, etc., that matches our survey questions are nearly the same.
Curious.
EVO

Peter Smith wrote:

01.14.12 at 7:09 PM

Interesting comment from Eric. Perhaps indicative of the men who are reading, and the women who are scheduling the social calendar using Local Wine Events?