Wine drinking up, beer down

Our pandemic drinking habits are at times understandable, other times confounding.

It doesn’t shock anyone that overall we’re drinking more during COVID, in part because we’re spending more time cooped up with time on our hands, cooking nice meals to be paired with wine and generally doing what we want within the parameters of a pandemic.

Data compiled by U.S.-based cash-back app Ibotta shows that since the pandemic started, spirits and hard liquor sales spiked 33%, which seems like a lot, wine sales bounced up 12%, which makes sense, and beer sales slipped 2%, which is surprising.

In the wine category, strange subsets saw the biggest surges with flavoured, fortified and rice wines respectively seeing 73%, 51% and 37% increases.

We bought 24% more Rose wine, 12% additional red, 9% more white and 5% more sparkling.