The Battle of Wine Shades: What Do UK Drinkers Love Most?

In the world of wine, there is something for almost everyone – with lots of subcategories defined mainly by grape type. However, people’s preference for what type of wine they drink is determined largely by ‘colour’.  White, red, rosé or fizzy – there may be many different varieties but it seems UK customers are more concerned with their wine’s colour than they are its style.

How do we know? By studying Google searches we can discern which wine colours are the most popular in the UK. 

General UK winner

In general, UK customers choose their wine dependent on the season. Taken as an average from Google’s search volume data, we can estimate the rough interest of each style. (Google Search data is an approximation of how many times in a month people type the term into google between Nov 2017-Dec 2019.) 

1. Rose wine: 14,800

2. Red wine: 14,800

3. White wine: 8100

4. Sparkling wine: 2900

It’s a strong tie between rose and red wine in terms of general month-on-month interest. This is mainly driven by summer, as from June til August searches for Rosé shoot to 22,200 each month whereas red wine peaks in December at 27,100!  

Of course, each of these broad wine types contains sub-categories, and by looking at the top 3 we can see that overall, the varieties of red wine are the most popular. 

Red wine top 3 styles

1. Pinot noir – 9900

2. Merlot – 6600

3. Beaujolais - 5400

White wine top 3 styles

1. Sauvignon blanc – 9900

2. Muscato - 4400

3. Riesling – 4400

Rose wine top 3 styles 

1. Whispering angel – 6600

2. Mateus rose – 2900

3. Rose champagne – 2400

Wine-Fan specific

To discover which wine wins in a more niche wine audience, we used our top 100 selling wines. In this audience, there is a clear winner – their results paint a clear picture of the most popular styles. 

1. 49% Red Wine

2. 28% White Wine

3. 9% Champagne

4. 7% Sparkling

5. 7% Rosé

For people who are shopping specifically on a wine-buying website, it seems that red wine is by far the most popular style and it’s not even close! 

Conclusion – the UK loves rosé, but fine wine fans favour red

In general, it seems that the summertime popularity of rosé makes it Britain’s favourite wine shade! 

However, it’s important to remember that rosé has far fewer distinct styles when compared to red or white wines. More people search for general ‘rosé’ whereas their searches for red or white might be for ‘merlot’, ‘pinot grigio’, ‘pinot noir’ etc. 

Christmas skew

Of course, all of that pales in comparison to the Christmas party season – when searches for sparkling wines rocket up and outperform all other styles. For example, Champagne hits a high of 90,500 average monthly searches in December – 4 times, or a 233% increase in red wine’s peak at 27,100 in the same month. 

So the results are in. The UK’s favourite general style is rosé wine. The wine lover, who shops online for their favourite wines, prefers red wine and we all drink champagne in droves at Christmas! 

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