Cracking Open Canned Wines: A Data Analysis
Many people would acknowledge that canned wine is having a major cultural moment. From my perspective, a few major shifts have carved the way for canned wine’s popularity:
- Practicality and immediacy: People want to “buy and drink now” rather than buying to cellar, paired with an on-the-go drinking culture. People also want to drink wine in the park, at a concert, etc. Cans are both more practical and convenient, and meant to be drank sooner rather than later.
- Social and branding: Many traditional wineries have faced challenges in adapting to the social and digital age, simply because it’s so far away from their core competency of winemaking. This paves the way for new brands to come in and thrive on social.
In this analysis, we were hoping to cover two main areas: what is different about canned wine? And are they good and worth trying?
Data and methodology
Using blogs featuring “top canned wines of 2018” and Google search results, we collected data on 118 canned wines, including 37 different brands. From there, we collected attributes of the wines such as how they are sold, price per can, volume per can, grapes, alcohol content and more. We will discuss these findings first.
Next, we did a blind canned wine tasting to see how the data matches up to reality. See the bottom section for results!
What the #cannedwine data says
Canned wine is more DTC
In 2018, 10% of domestically sold wines were direct to consumer. In comparison, roughly 20% of canned wine producers are only direct to consumer and another 30% were both distributed and direct to consumer.
Canned wine is pretty California-centric
Not only are most of the producers’ based out of and distributing their wine in the United States, most of the grapes are even coming from California wines. 70% of canned wines we analyzed were made from California grapes, followed by 8% from Italy and 5% from both Oregon and Washington.
It’s not all bubbles and rose.
When people think about canned wine — fizzy rose and sparkling wine tend to come to mind. This confusion could be rooted in the popularization of “wine spritzers” which are essentially carbonated and flavored wines — but that’s not what we’re talking about here with canned wine.
Contrary to common belief, canned wine is predominantly white wine — with 32% still and 9% sparkling. However the next largest group is rose — with 24% still and 9% sparkling. The remaining 26% is red wine, mostly still. We only had 1 orange canned wine in the mix — Companion Malvasia.
Size varies a lot, and so does price!
There is something naturally strange about buying a can of something for $10; however what people don’t often realize is that the $10 can is ½ of a bottle — making it comparable to a $20 bottle of wine (feels a little better to buy it right!?).
However you can’t assume that all canned wines are the same serving size — in fact, roughly 50% of canned wines are 375ml, or half a bottle!. As a result, it might be useful to pause and look at the volume of the can — both for assessing the price, and also for realizing how much you’ll be drinking if you consume the whole can!
The good news is that the price also tends to vary with the size of the cans. So the price may be more closely associated with the volume of what you are purchasing, rather than the quality of the wine.
Now for the blind taste test and ranking
We sampled 20 canned wines based on what we could easily access from going to 5 different wine retailers in San Francisco. So naturally we missed out on all of the canned wine that are only direct to consumer.
Process
- Blind tasted all the wines, giving it a personal rating from 1–5 and taking notes on what we liked/didn’t like about each.
- After tasting all, we made our own personal rankings of all the canned wines.
- Then we combined the rankings and found an average aggregate ranking.
Results
Each wine’s distribution of ratings is shown below, with the average denoted by the white dot. The winning wines of each category — rose, bubbles, white and red — are highlighted. West and wilder white and cupcake sauvignon blanc were actually tied!
It was also interesting to see which category performed the best. We tasted rose and bubbles first, so one could argue we’d be more generous with ratings later on in the tasting. It was also quite hot outside when we did the tasting, possibly introducing bias against the red wines. Overall — if we take the data at face value — the rose and bubbles performed slightly better on average than the other categories.
Another interesting thing to look at were the distribution of our raters themselves. The bias of knowing you are tasting “canned wine” could make someone be more harsh on their ratings. The rater were each given a goal to achieve a mean rating of 3 — however only one rater achieved this.
And last, because of course you want to know who your new drinking buddy should be — we looked at which raters were the most well correlated.
And some other interesting data points from the canned wine blind tasting:
- Nobody was able to successfully guess the “surprise bottle of red wine” that we added to the lineup.
- Some of the top overall wines were also the most controversial: west+wilder white blend, Simpler red blend and Infinite Monkey Theorem red blend all had both some of the highest means, and highest standard deviations.
- People agreed that pouring a can out into a glass rid most of the metallic taste.
- Our rating scale was 1–5, but none of the canned wines received a 5.
