Consumers See Less Need for Ingredient Lists for Wine

Two in five wine consumers who haven't seen an ingredient list on wine think wine should have an ingredient list.  One in four doesn't believe it's necessary, and the rest don't care.  

That's one of the interesting facts contained in a survey by the Wine Marketing Council about how wine consumers feel about ingredients and nutritional information on wine and competitive products.

While the influence/importance of ingredient lists, and nutrition labels, is much lower for beverage alcohol than other food/drinks, younger consumers tend to consider ingredient listings to be more important than older consumers.

By a large margin, wine consumers believe wine has the fewest ingredients, compared to beer and especially hard seltzers or cocktails.

When shown a list of ingredients in two wines, most respondents negatively perceived Sulfur Dioxide. Only SO2 and Tartaric Acid have more negative than positive responses.

For both nutrition and ingredient information, between one-quarter and one-third of the wine consumers who have not seen this information on wine packages assume there are different labeling requirements for alcoholic beverages. Over 25% had not noticed they were missing until the survey. Only 16% thought the wine was nutritionally worse than other drinks or that producers didn’t want to disclose something.

Almost half of the wine drinkers perceive wine as high in sugar, second only to RTDs. In contrast, wine is seen as significantly lower in carbohydrates and calories (lower than RTDs or beer) and artificial ingredients (lower than RTDs and Hard Seltzer). On average, consumers think a 5 oz. pour of wine is about 145 calories; answers ranged from 50 to 250, with one quarter estimating a typical serving containing 200 or more (much higher than most table wines).

The price of the wine did not influence most consumers’ thoughts on the number of ingredients, i.e., they did not associate more or fewer ingredients with lower or higher-priced wines.

The survey was conducted in September and October of 2022 on 500 core (drink wine at least weekly) and 500 marginal wine consumers, distributed closely by gender and age to the U.S. standards established by the WMC Benchmark Segmentation Study in 2021-2022.