A while ago, I read somewhere that [-]Belgium[/-] Luxembourg had surpassed France as the #1 wine drinking nation.
Just now, check again, and France is shown as #1 in 2019, with a per capita annual consumption of 6.74 liters of pure alcohol. Using an average of 12% alcohol content of wine, I compute an annual consumption of 56 liters/year, or about 1.5 bottles/week.
Does not seem like a lot, but that includes children and people who do not drink. The heavy drinkers may do 2x that perhaps, or maybe even more, like a bottle/day?
But that is still nothing. What's scary is this. The statistics show that back in 1960, the French per capita consumption was 20.56 liters of alcohol. That works out to 171 liters of wine per year, or 3.3 liters of wine per week, or 4.4 bottles/week. And that's average for every citizen of France, including children.
With the per capita consumption in 2019 dropping to 1/3 that in 1960, no wonder I read that Europeans don't drink wine as much as they used to. The surplus makes wine so cheap, there was one year the EU had to buy wine at a price of pennies/liter and distilled it to make ethanol to mix with gasoline.
PS. I made a grave error in assigning the total alcohol consumption to wine drinking. That's not true, as all countries also drink hard liquor, beer, etc... But France also drinks a lot of wine per capita, with Portugal claiming the top spot some years. Italy also follows closely.
Instead of the per capita wine consumption of 56 liters/year that I computed, France only drinks 40.7 liters of wine. The difference is due to other alcoholic beverages.