Per capita wine consumption

Between 2004 and 2022, every time humanity collectively decided to drink a little more wine per person, someone apparently felt compelled to write a Wikipedia article about something. Six million articles and several liters of Pinot Grigio later, we have arrived here, together, reading about spurious correlations. The r-value of 0.97 suggests the relationship is remarkably stable, which raises the question of what happens to Wikipedia's article count if the world goes sober. Probably nothing good.

Both metrics track the long arc of globalization and rising middle-class prosperity from the mid-2000s onward. Wine consumption has expanded as emerging economies developed wine cultures — particularly China and other Asian markets — mirroring the same educated, globally-connected demographic that contributes to and relies on Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia grew from roughly 500,000 articles in 2004 to over 6.7 million by 2022, while global wine consumption per capita tracked steadily upward before plateauing. Both are proxies for the same expanding, digitally-engaged, culturally-curious global class.

Two products of human curiosity and leisure time, growing in parallel, tell us more about the world's expanding educated middle class than about any connection between viticulture and encyclopedism. The correlation is real; the cause is just bigger than either variable.