What Real Estate Listings Reveal About Wine Consumption

Feb. 2, 2015 – A novel way to find out where all the wine drinking is taking place is to canvas real estate listings.  According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, a survey of listings in 2014 that mention “wine cellar” or something similar put Orange County, California as the leading area.

We’re not talking about a special wine fridge in the kitchen.  These are cellars that hold hundreds, if not thousands, of bottles.  According to the owner of Wine Cellar Concepts, which is a national company specializing in building cellars, the cost of a cellar or wine room is $40,000 to $90,000.

It’s not like everyone in Orange County hangs out in their wine room.  To put it in perspective, only 2.4% of Orange County listings mentioned a wine cellar.  But they beat out New York City, which came in at 15^th on the list.  Of course there’s more sprawl in Orange County meaning there are really big homes with space for a wine room.  Maybe the sprawl is vertical in Manhattan, but there are plenty of huge apartments in New York so we’re not buying it.  Orange County, home of Disneyland, is where the wine is at.

As one might expect, San Francisco came in second, followed by Dallas, Texas, Fairfield, Connecticut and Ventura County, California.

The biggest dearth of wine lovers appears to be in Cincinnati and even Las Vegas didn’t do too well ranking 96 out of 100 markets surveyed.