This State Has The Most Wineries

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 19, 8:26AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This State Has The Most Wineries — © BruceBlock / iStock via Getty Images

The average American drinks 3.2 gallons of wine a year. That translates to 872 million gallons. According to Martha Stewart, this is the highest of any nation. And, since many Americans don’t drink at all, the number is misleading. Among drinkers, the measures must be much higher.

A great deal of the wine Americans drink is not from vineyards in this country. The U.S. is the world’s leading importer.

The first commercial winery in the country, opened in 1799, was the appropriately named First Vineyard outside Lexington, Kentucky. Though it was revived in the early years of this century, the original operation didn’t last past the mid-1800s. On the other hand, the Brotherhood Winery in Washingtonville, New York, vintage 1839, has remained open since its founding, making it the oldest continuously operating winery in America.

[nativounit]

New York and especially Kentucky may not be the first places you think of when you think of winemaking, but today there are wineries in every one of the 50 states. Even Hawaii, even Alaska, have wineries — though in the latter case, the wines are based on berries or on grape juice imported from other states. In many other parts of the country, too, fruit other than grapes is used or wine is made from native American or French-American hybrid grapes, not familiar European varieties like merlot or chardonnay.

24/7 Tempo has picked the state with most bonded wineries per capita in every state. Those numbers, as well as the total number of wineries in each state, are based on data published by VinePair, a digital media company producing content related to wine and other alcoholic beverages. VinePair drew the data from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

A bonded winery is one producing wine under a bond guaranteeing payment of federal excise taxes. Most American wineries are bonded, but according to the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015, any producer owing less than $50,000 per year in taxes will no longer be required to maintain a wine bond, so the actual number of wineries around the country is probably larger than this data indicates.

The state on the top of the list is Oregon. Here are the details:

> Wineries per capita: 21.6 per 100,000 people
> Total number of wineries: 917 — 4th highest
> Population: 4,217,737 — 24th lowest

Click here to read States With The Most (and Fewest) Wineries

[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.