A look back on a big year reveals some quirky realities about our users– consisting of a love of Primitivo.
© Shutterstock|As we track back through in 2015’s searches, we find the big hitters.
When the red wine world pivoted to digital in 2020, people wondered how long the pattern of online purchasing would last as soon as the lockdowns were over. Well, it’s still going on.
Online sales have actually stayed strong given that the lifting of shelter-in-place orders and worldwide lockdowns and, if Wine-Searcher’s figures for the past year are anything to go by, are just likely to get more powerful.
Wine-Searcher users have kept the digital trend going by gathering to the online area in 2022. For example, we had 56 million distinct website/app users in 2022, up 14 percent. Mobile phone use increased by 17 percent, while desktop use grew by 8 percent. Overall check outs to our website and app struck 95m, up 7 percent on last year.
Geographically, the United States reinforced its position as Wine-Searcher’s largest market, with a 20 percent increase in users from the US.
On the other hand, the busy personnel behind Wine-Searcher have actually had a busy year guaranteeing the website is as extensive as possible, with nearly 48,000 brand-new products added and matched– that is, gathered, codified and classified to make looking for them simpler– in 2022. That includes almost 28,000 new white wines, more than 10,000 brand-new spirits (of which almost 4000 were scotches), 7300 beers and 3000 various other items.
Offers– or price points for specific products provided by merchants– increased by 2.4 m in 2022.
We also increased the amount of information available on the website, consisting of half a million critic ratings, indicating we now have 25,000 more products with a score attached. On top of ratings, we have also added more tasting notes to the site from a range of critics, while our vigorous white wine director David Allen MW has added tasting notes and videos to 2900 search results page pages on his own.
We also increased the variety of awards we record (and the occurring tasting notes) and increased the variety of label images by almost 50,000.
This year also saw a brand-new task remove. In Between April and December, we included 882,423 characteristic information points– extra details about the wines and spirits like organic/biodynamic status, alcohol strength, residual sugar, sweet taste levels, viticulture and wine making notes for thousands of red wines. This effort is ongoing, with a devoted group guaranteeing that there will be much more info readily available for a lot more individual red wines in the future.
And it was good to see these efforts rewarded when we picked up the innovation trophy at the Golden Vines Awards in Florence in September.
So what was everybody looking for? Well, category-wise, white wine searches were up by 4 percent to 208m. Spirits saw an uptick of 30 percent (to 43m), while ready-to-drink and pre-mixed drink searches were up by 77 percent to 900,000. Sake searches rose 11 percent to 370,000, and beer searches rose by 63 percent to 2.7 m.
Overall, the most searched-for products were the typical suspects, however there was one intriguing information.
The most searched-for product released in 2022 suggested that the global recession might not be biting as deeply as everybody feared: it was the Krug Grand Cuvée 170eme edition, which weighs in at a global typical price of $234. The product with the most referrals (where a user clicks through from our website to a merchant website, with the intention of getting) for 2022 was the Ardbeg Ardcore Single Malt, which will set you back approximately $174 a bottle. Economic downturn? What economic downturn?
As for the other areas of the site, we’ve already covered off what news individuals read about on Wine-Searcher in 2022, but the other different corners of the website produce interesting reading, too.
Overall, our encyclopedia (covering grapes, areas, manufacturers, vintages, awards, critics and so on) hit 15.5 m UPVs, with the Regions section being the most popular at around one-third of that figure. Manufacturers had around 3.3 m UPVs, while Grapes and News had around 2m each. Critics, Awards and Vintages made up the majority of the rest.
In the Regions section of the encyclopedia, Burgundy was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top specific region with practically 40,000 distinct page views (UPVs). Nevertheless, that was dwarfed when we look at the country-level entries, where India was the surprise hit of the year, with nearly 84,000 UPVs.
Taking a look at the information for the Grapes area, there was a bit of a surprise. While the unavoidable Bordeaux Red Blend was the most popular blend with users, it was Primitivo that triumphed of the varietal charts, with more than 35,000 UPVs– about 10,000 more than king Cabernet got.
Turning to the Critic pages, it’s clear that Wine-Searcher users’ loyalty to the memory of Robert Parker stays unshaken, with the Wine Advocate page topping the list of UPVs with nearly 75,000 for the year.
And when it pertains to Producers, the old marketing truism that sex offers was substantiated again last year. The leading manufacturer page visited was for an apparently stopped brand name– XXX Siglo Treinta Tequila, which had more than 153,000 UPVs, primarily from individuals whose search word was just XXX. We believed we were being uncharitable in believing they were most likely looking for something more carnal than you’re most likely to find on our website up until we found that the second most-visited manufacturer page, with more than 18,000 hits was for Big Black Cock rum.
Of the producers who weren’t (clearly) associated to sexual terms or porn, it was Burgundy’s Domaine Leroy that headed the list, with simply over 17,000 UPVs. The website notes wines differing in typical price from $58 at the lowest end to $41,000, so it actually does look like the recession isn’t hitting everybody. Let’s hope the confidence continues through 2023.
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