A report released by Areni Global today held many interesting statistics about people who buy fine wines, which Areni defines as wines priced at  $75 or higher, or the equivalent in British and Chinese currency.

Do you think fine wine buyers are old? Areni executive director Pauline Vicard says that in the US and UK, they are younger than the average wine buyer, with many in their 30s.

Are they mostly men? Well, yes in the US and UK, where about 75 percent are men. But in China and Hong Kong, it's a 50-50 split between men and women.

Which country cares most about ageworthiness? You'd think it would be the British, because every British wine writer and her grandfather goes on about this. In fact, British buyers are the least likely to describe a fine wine by saying "it improves with age"; only 35 percent consider it important. The most likely to prize ageworthiness are the Chinese (57 percent), followed by Americans (47 percent.)

British fine wine buyers care more about "a complex taste" than the others. Americans also care, but Chinese don't care at all. British fine wine buyers also care about regional typicity, but Americans and mainland Chinese do not.

Amazingly, only Hong Kong buyers claim to be motivated by scarcity for fine wine, and only mainland Chinese buyers care if a wine comes from a famous wine-growing region or is made by a well-known winemaker.

Areni worked with Wine Intelligence to come up with these findings. In the UK, about 10 percent of wine consumers sometimes buy wines priced at more than £50 ($70). That number in the US is only about 7 percent, but the US has a much larger population so the total number of fine wine buyers in the US is about double the UK. It's nothing compared to China, though – fully two-thirds of mainland Chinese wine drinkers sometimes spend more than the equivalent of $75 on a bottle of wine, making its potential market of fine-wine buyers 35.2 million people – more than six times as many as in the US. This is why the recent precipitous drop in wine sales in China is troubling to the high-end wine business.

Where does fine wine come from? It depends on where the buyer is.

The UK is still a Bordeaux-dominated market; fully 83 percent of UK fine wine consumers listed it as a source of fine wines, followed by Italy, Burgundy and Champagne. Hong Kong consumers also listed Bordeaux as the top source of fine wines.

But in the US, only 24 percent of fine wine buyers listed Bordeaux as a source of fine wines. US buyers prefer high-end wines from California, followed by Italy.

And Chinese consumers listed China as the top source of fine wines. Bordeaux was tied with Australia, a reminder of how devastating China's current tariffs on Australian wine are to the Aussies. British and Hong Kong consumers did not recognize US fine wines at all, but they are still popular in mainland China despite a US-China tariff war that has not yet abated.

Matters of taste

Who does the most "formal wine tastings with friends"? The mainland Chinese, followed by US and Hong Kong consumers. UK consumers are the least interested in this.

The reasons people choose one fine wine over another also vary a lot by country. Chinese and British consumers are most interested in the quality of the vintage; only 25 percent of Americans care about vintage.

Sustainability is not very important to fine wine buyers in any country, but it may be surprising to learn that the UK is the least interested in it – only 7 percent of fine wine buyers care. The highest interest, still not very high at 21 percent, is in ... mainland China.

"It could be that people believe wine is a natural product that doesn't need more environmental response," said Felicity Carter, former editor-in-chief of Meininger's Wine Business International.

Vicard said that even if sustainability isn't important to most consumers, it does matter to gatekeepers like sommeliers. She said restaurants post-pandemic will have more limited wine lists than before, and that if a restaurant slashes its offerings from 70 Bordeaux to 30, it will use sustainability to separate them.

There may be blog posts from the anti-wine-critic crowd cherrypicking stats to say that critics don't matter anymore, but the data indicates that critics do matter; it just depends on how the question is asked. Chinese and US consumers both say a fine wine is partly defined by having high ratings from critics – but then say they don't pay attention to experts' tasting notes and ratings. British consumers do care about experts' tasting notes and ratings, but also say that a high rating does not define a fine wine.

"There is a tremendous body of emerging research saying critics are extremely important in terms of pricing and how many people buy the wines," Carter said.

In each country, between 25 and 30 percent of fine wine buyers buy the wines as a financial investment, less than half the percentage who say they buy them to give as gifts, or to casually drink with family or close friends. So if you know someone who buys fine wines, see if you can become a close friend.