Australian wine drinking on the rise

Alcohol consumption in Australia is at a 50-year low as the country’s “bloke” culture continues to decline, further evidenced by an increase in white wine consumption.

“I’ll have a schooner of Chardonnay please, mate.”

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, beer consumption has declined from 75% of all alcohol consumed in the 1960s to just 41% today, while in the same period wine has grown its share from 12% to 38%.

Furthermore, in 2014 Australians aged 15 and over drank just 9.7 litres of pure alcohol each, 2.1 drinks a day, the lowest amount since the 1960s.

It is thought that alcohol consumption peaked in the 1970s, dipped before rising again in the mid-2000s and has slid once more.

As was pointed out in The Telegraph, however, even the 1970s couldn’t match the rate of consumption seen in Australia’s earlier colonial days of the 1830s when the average Australian drank 13.6 litres of pure alcohol a year – although spirits such as rum were also more widely consumed on a day-to-day at that time.

Interestingly, the ABS also revealed a preference not for hearty Aussie reds but for white wines, 270 million litres of white being consumed in Australia last year compared to just 190m litres of red.

The ABS also pointed out however that the amount of alcohol “available for consumption” between 2013-2014 was 183.7m litres of pure alcohol, a slight increase on the 183.6m litres available in the 2012-2013 period.

The shift in drinking patterns in Australia has many of the same causes seen in other countries such as the UK and revolve around drinking less but better, greater health awareness, the dangers of excessive drinking and the dangers of drunken violence and drink driving.

Although Australian men were once renowned for their beer drinking prowess – former Labour prime minister Bob Hawke said he once drank a yard of beer in just over two seconds while studying at Oxford – in a sign of the changing times current prime minister Tony Abbott received some criticism recently for downing a schooner of beer with a university football team in Sydney

Professor Rob Moodie of Melbourne University told The Telegraph that beer drinking was far from dead, particularly among the country’s sportsmen, but that there was a trend for drinking in bars and European wine bars instead.

“There is still a major focus on male beer drinking being part of Australia and on drinking being part of our culture,” he told the paper.

“The major Australian sportspeople are still major ambassadors for alcohol. But there has been a real focus in the past five years on the damage alcohol does.”