

Ask HN: (Inquiry)How much you spend on wine? - dkvochkin

How often do you buy wine?
How much are you willing to spend, per bottle?<p>Thanks!
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mdip
I drink quite rarely myself. I've purchased two bottles of wine since January
of last year.

I reserve drinking wine to extremely special occasions, so I stick with wines
that I know I love or were recommended by a trusted third party (I have a
brother-in-law who's a wine geek/knows my tastes). As a result, the last two
bottles I purchased were Mollydooker's Blue Eyed Boy (at $36 -- normally this
runs $45, but for some reason the Costco in Ann Arbor, MI has it for an
exceptionally low price) and Mollydooker's Carnival of Love (at ~$100). I
wouldn't buy the latter again. Though it was great, paying $100 for a glass of
wine is hard to stomach and I won't drink re-corked wine (no device I've tried
is capable of preserving wine in a way that makes me want to drink it the next
day).

To specifically answer: once per year, and I'm willing to spend up to $50
since it's such a rare indulgence. That said, a decade ago I could find wines
that I enjoyed for around $15-$20 USD and purchased a bottle about twice a
month.

(and yes, those are accurate numbers -- no need to multiply by 7 due to people
normally under-reporting the amount that they drink)

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shoo
I was probably buying 1 or 2 bottles a week for much of last year. Probably
$15-$25 AUD / bottle. Less so now.

Unless you're specifically investigating a niche market of (people who comment
on hacker news) & (people who spend money on wine), it might be a good idea to
hunt for wine industry statistics / market research.

Some arbitrary suggestions:

* "An Econometric Analysis of Wine Consumption in Australia" [1]:

> On average, over the 5 decades, consumers allocated about 5 percent of their
> income on alcohol with 3.3 percent to beer, 1 percent to wine and 0.7
> percent to spirits. Within alcohol, for every dollar the Australians spent
> on alcohol, on average, he/she allocated 65 cents on beer, 20 cents on wine
> and the remaining 15 cents on spirits.

* "Consumer Insights" [2]:

> In developed wine markets, people drink wine because they want to enjoy it,
> not because of the health benefits they might get from it.

(ha!)

> People attach different values to wines in relation to the occasion they are
> faced with. However, consumers with stronger personalities are less subject
> to normative influences.

(ha ha!)

> There are different segments of consumers in the on-line environment, with
> different level of skills and trust towards this form of retailing.
> Convenience and the price comparisons are attractive, but people still don’t
> like the fact that wines cannot be tasted and they are worried about the
> security of the transactions. This may change, but recent research still
> finds risk an issue. Online purchasing represents about 5% of the total wine
> market in developed countries.

[1] [https://www.adelaide.edu.au/wine-
econ/events/2030workshop/pu...](https://www.adelaide.edu.au/wine-
econ/events/2030workshop/pubs/Selvanathan_WC0210.pdf)

[2] [http://research.wineaustralia.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04...](http://research.wineaustralia.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/Consumer-Insights-discussion-paper.pdf)

~~~
dkvochkin
yes, i am trying to investigate the market of people who spend money on wines.
Thanks for pointing me in the (right) direction!

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danieltillett
I buy every few months in bulk (for my cellar) and I have a limit of $20 per
bottle. I do blog about the bargains I find, but I don't think anyone reads
these posts.

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theoneone
About 5€ per month but I am willing to spend 50-70€ for a bottle.

~~~
danieltillett
That is a very infrequent purchase :)

