Vote in our Wine Poll

Every month we ask a topical question to either test your knowledge or seek your opinion. To take part in this month's poll simply click on one of the multi-choice answers on the poll below. The latest results will be revealed.

Which one of the following is most useful when buying wine?

Poll ran Oct 2011

Answer	Oct 11	Feb 11	May 10	Apr 09	Oct 08
Cutting back on how much you are spending on each wine	10%	12%	9%	17%	5%
Cutting back on the amount of wine drunk	18%	12%	19%	12%	10%
Spending more	20%	12%	16%	13%	9%
Spending the same	52%	63%	56%	59%	76%

Comment by Chris Scott:

This poll has been run regularly since Oct 2008. With 20% spending more, it is the largest increase since the poll began in Oct 2008. But with 18% cutting back on the amount drunk, the second highest and well above the typical 10-12% it shows that people are still concerned about how much is being consumed. In the wine world spending more on less is a worthy goal. But I think it more likely shows that the economy is in flux. With 52% not consciously changing how much they spend on wine, the lowest so far, many people are being affected by the economy..

The poll had 83 entriess

Which one of the following is most useful when buying wine?

Poll ran June 2011

Answer	June 2011	July 2009
Recommendations from friends	64%	65%
Wine columns in the weekend newspapers or food & wine magazines	24%	23%
Online wine websites	7%	8%
Published wine guide books	6%	4%

Comment by Chris Scott:

I am amazed at how consistent the results are compared to two years ago. Only changing by 1% at most between July 2009 and June 2011. The results are "recommendations from friends" which hasn’t changed at 64%, "wine columns in newspapers and magazines" is up 1% to 24% with "online websites" down 1% to 7% and "published wine books" up 2% to 6%.

Such small changes doesn’t say much for the likes of twitter and facebook. Two years ago neither were anywhere near as big as they are now. So I would have expected "recommendation from friends" to go up.
New online wine recommendation sites appear all the time. So again I would have expected "recommendation from websites" to go up at the cost of a newspaper or guidebooks. But no, things haven’t moved on much at all. It makes you wonder how important social media is for the sale of wine ?. The wine press appears to think it is important but this survey implies it is not.

My advice last time we ran this poll is still consistent whatever your source of information. It’s important that whoever you are taking advice from has a similar taste to yours. If they like big tannic monsters and you prefer softer rounded wines, then you need to question their suitability to recommend wines for you. The advantage of following media types in wine recommendations is that they have tried a massive range of wines and if their tastes are similar to yours you can experiment with confidence.

At the end of the day, one person’s advice is as good as another’s if they have similar likes to you, but for truly unusual wines you need a book or an expert to guide you.

The poll had 94 entriess

Should alcohol units and calories be declared on the front labels of wine?

Poll ran April 2011

Answer	April 2011	Sept 2007
Just the number of alcohol units	43%	39%
Just the calories	1%	2%
Both the alcohol units and the calories	30%	37%
Neither	26%	23%

Comment by Chris Scott:

Last time we ran this poll 77% wanted the alcohol on bottles and 39% wanted calories now 73% want alcohol units on a bottle and 44% want calories, these are reasonably stable numbers and shows that some people would like calories, on the bottles. Like many things once the change has happened support will increase as some people will start to use it and those who don’t use it, will realise it doesn’t hurt them.

As a person who has been starting to track my calories to get the spare tyre around my waste to deflate a bit I am now looking at calories quite a bit more. A bottle of dry red wine has around 510 calories which is a fifth of my daily calorie count. Higher for someone not so big as me. If I drank half a bottle, my maximum under government guidelines I would be consuming around 10% of by calories for the day or 255 calories. To give you perspective a McDonald’s cheese burger is 330 calories. These are significant numbers and they should be on display. I don’t think they are as important as alcohol units, but they are important.

The poll had 188 entries