WineMaker Turns 15

Over 15 years, we’ve enjoyed seeing the hobby of home winemaking grow along with our readership. Just how much has it grown? Every year WineMaker sends out a reader survey to gauge our readers’ engagement with the winemaking community. Some respondents say they make hundreds of gallons a year, while others only make a few batches here and there. Overall, the averages are quite impressive. Here’s a breakdown by the numbers of a great 15 years of winemaking.

• On average, WineMaker readers have reported making 7.6 batches of wine per year, at an average of 9 gallons per batch.

Based on that average, over 15 years, our readers have made an incredible amount of wine, totaling 85,629,665 gallons. That is enough to fill 428,148,325 standard wine bottles, or 130 Olympic swimming pools. If we laid the corks used in those bottles from end to end, there would be almost enough to reach from the North Pole to the South Pole. In
the process, we have used over 170,000,000,000 grapes. Last year, our readers made over 30,000,000 bottles of wine, enough to pop open a bottle with each person living in the country of Peru.

• Individual readers spend on average $749.29 annually on winemaking supplies and equipment. Over the past 15 years that works out to be an investment of more than $10,000 per reader on average, with some spending many thousands more. From our calculations, readers as a whole have spent a total of $957,437,200 over 15 years.

• While the hobby is growing, it is also maintaining a strong core of committed winemakers. The percentage of readers who had been making wine for more than 9 years as of 2012 is 36%.

• Meanwhile, the percentage who had been making wine for one year or less is 14%. This year, 90% of readers said they plan to make as much or more wine as they did last year.

• Since we began, WineMaker’s readership has grown to 66,600.

• US states with current WineMaker subscribers: 50

• Canadian provinces and territories with current WineMaker subscribers: 13

• Countries with current WineMaker subscribers: 38

• In 11 years of the WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition, a total of 36,816 wines have been entered. We have devoted 182 hours to winemaking seminars at our six WineMaker Magazine Conferences.

Being a part of this growing and vibrant hobby community has been a pleasure for us, as we hope it has been for you. Thank you to all you readers for the continued success of WineMaker. In the next 15 years there will be more and more new opportunities for winemakers to share with each other and to grow their craft. We will be there all along the way. Cheers!