Irregular wine drinkers in the UK choose wine mainly from Australia, but France, Spain and Italy are the countries of origin that more regular drinkers turn to, according to new research.
A report by wine researchers Wine Intelligence, assessing wines based on frequency of consumption, says that Australian wines do not figure in the top three of wines drunk by frequent wine consumers.
Wine Intelligence asked a sample of the public which source countries they drank from in the past six months, and then which one country they drank from most frequently. This provided a ranking of countries of origin for infrequent drinkers - a 'usage' measure.
It then asked consumers who drink wine from a given range of countries at least once every three months how many times they drank wines from each country within the range during that period. This provided a ranking for people who have a wide portfolio of source countries, but would perhaps only drink wine from certain countries infrequently throughout the year - a 'frequency' measure.
Under the first measures, the top three ran Australia, France, South Africa. Under the second, it changed to France, Spain, Italy.
Richard Halstead, chief operating officer at Wine Intelligence said: "Both measures have a role in helping us understand consumer relationships with different countries of origin. More specifically, for those that do well in the 'usage' measure, we can hypothesize that they are better at establishing some kind of relationship with consumers, be it through better distribution, or being seen as particularly appropriate for a certain occasion.
"For those countries doing well at the 'frequency' measure, the suggestion would be that consumers are using them across a number of occasions, or perhaps that there is a correlation between frequent drinkers and buyers of wine from these countries."