Long gone are the days of the 30+ volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica that used to line your parents’ bookshelves back in the day. today, one only needs to “google” for information available right at your fingertips. So, I was interested in what wine terms folks have been googling the most in the first quarter of this year and used the Google Insights for Search beta and Google Trends using the search term “wine.” Keep in mind that seasonality plays a big role in the popularity of wine, so the rankings we see so far in 2010, may not be what we see come December.
The Search Volume Index above shows that the wine topic is lower than the average in the last 2 years over this period of time (2004-Q1 2010). Might the economic situation have something to do with this? The drop below 1.0 (the average) begins in early 2008 and continues through 2009. Strangely, the News Reference Volume at the bottom of the chart above, shows a spike at the end of 2007. At first, this didn’t make a lick of sense. That is until I discovered that around this time a new application named “Wine” was developed that allows Linux to run Windows applications. Additionally, a software package manager by Ubuntu allows a Linux user to find apps and alternatives for specific Windows programs. You will see why I mention this further below in the post. So, you see, my wine trend and insight search is now cluttered with un-related techno-crap because some geek thought they would be creative and name some software that describes absolutely nothing about what it does. I don’t know many wines that come close to competing with Jolt Cola in that target market. At least that’s what I used to drink back when I was cutting some late night code back in the 90′s.
Another interesting tidbit from the Index above is the very significant doubled-horned spikes at the end of each year. Can you say Thanksgiving and Christmas?
When comparing the 1st quarter results of 2010 to the top 10 wine-related searches of the previous two years (2008 and 2009), I noticed the following:
- “red wine” and “wine bar” remain the most popular
- “white wine” is in the #3 spot in 2009 and 2010 after not being even in the top 10 in 2008. Is there more interest in white wines these days? Will the rule of ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) finally fall by the wayside as winemakers get back to basics and let the fruit decide on its own what it will be when it grows up?
- “wine bottle,” “wine tasting” and “wine glass” are all inching up the list in the past couple of years. What is so interesting about the wine bottle? Some recent topics include green-related initiatives to use less glass in wine bottles to reduce shipping costs. I love wine tastings so I am glad to see that it is increasing in importance possibly. And I think Riedel will be happy to see “wine glass” gain in importance too.
Another cool feature of the Insights data is what they call “Rising Searches.” They are searches that are up a significant percent in the defined period. When I ran this search a few days ago, the top 10 rising searches were as follows:
- that wine movie – “Blood into Wine” is a movie recently released about Maynard James Keenan, the vocalist for the band Tool, and his love of wine
- blood into wine – same as above
- new wine 2010 – A well known spiritual festival and conference throughout the world, with the summer version being held in New Zealand
- moscato wine – Not sure, but could be due to the Springtime being a great time for such wines that are sweet and refreshing. The Regional drill-down of this data showed most searches by Italy, followed by France and U.S.
- moscato – see above
- red wine calories – This was high in January and trending down, mostly due to New Year’s resolutions in my opinion. There are approximately 525 calories in a bottle of wine, by the way
- kosher wine – The timing of passover is probably driving this request but I don’t know that much about Kosher wine
- calories in wine – see above
- wine mac – Looks like the makers of Wine for Linux are considering a version for Mac. I though Mac users were Mac users because they hated Windows
- wine for mac – see above
What’s the lesson to learn here? I guess that just depends on your aim. Sometimes, it’s just fun to look at data and see what the world is thinking of about wine. But, also, you can see the seasonality in the world’s interest as well as the terms used by folks looking for wine information. So, if you happen to have an online presence related to wine (say, a wine blog) this information could be quite useful if you are looking for traffic. Can you say Thanksgiving and Christmas?!
Choogle!
Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard, said “I suspect that when the history is written 200 years from now, it will emerge that something very important happened in human thinking during the time when we were alive, and that is that we are becoming rational, analytical and data-driven in a far wider range of activity than we ever have been before. ” A post like this not only stands out from all other wine blogosphere entries for today due to being completely different and very interesting, but highlights something I have been thinking about in regards to the biggest influence I think wine blogging has on the wine world. The confluence of information that is available to consumers is really quite radical. But in reverse the confluence of consumer habits, thoughts, and trends that is available to the wine industry is really staggering. Thanks for this post, I think it highlights something that for the most part we don’t fully grasp the potential of.
Scott, I agree. Thanks for the comment! There is so much information being collected, we just have to be able to query it, filter it, find out what it means and figure out what to do with it…
As a self-professed stat nerd, this is one of the best posts EVER (about goole wine stats)! I wonder if there are other stats we could pull together to further illuminate the trend and the reasons behind it.
Great work, Ed
Josh
Excellent post Ed, one of if not your best. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times and have played a little with Google’s tools (“wine blog” doesn’t even chart on Trends until almost ’07). Like @nectarwine, I’m a bit of a stat nerd and play with data as part of my day job. This post piques my curiosity, there is an opportunity out there, we just have to massage the info and figure out what the hell it is. Thanks
I’m with you guys on stat nerdiness yet we only have touched the surface of the onion with this post. The next thing we must do is peel back a few more layers
Very interesting post – I especially like that you didn’t just give the data, but gave some insight behind it. This knowledge can help everyone in the industry improve their online and offline marketing strategies. Thanks!