Is wine simply not ‘trendy’ anymore?

I was fiddling around in Google Trends (www.google.com/trends – Essentially a tool to gauge what people are searching for on Google’s search engine relative to the volume of overall Google searches) today doing something vaguely work related and decided to punch in, just for my own amusement, a search on the trending of the search term ‘wine’ in Australia.

What this trend search then spat out is interesting to say the least (I’ve pasted a screenshot of it below).

By the look of that graph (and if you have a google account you can have a look for yourself  http://www.google.com/trends?q=wine&geo=aus&sa=N ) it appears that the term ‘wine’ is being searched for – in Australia – less often than it was six years ago. Conversely, the amount of mentions that wine is getting in the ‘news’ section (ie online news & media) has absolutely rocketed, spiking from the end of 2007 onwards.

Now this is just one metric, and one search term, but it does beg the question – is wine, as a product, not as ‘trendy’ as it was 6 years ago? Has wine gone from being a part of our diet to idle newspaper fodder?

Just for reference I duplicated the search and this time replaced Australia with the UK:

Now it looks like the ‘news’ reference appears to be a static global figure (and thus a vague measurement at best), but again, the traffic appears to be dropping off in this figure for the UK, and dramatically so in the last 18 months (hello GFC) (I love too how flat the search volume is in the UK over the year vs the Christmas time spike too – very English).

Finally, I broadened the scale to ‘worldwide’:

And this is perhaps the most damning of the lot, suggesting that wine may indeed be on the wane (at least within Google searches). The drop off in the past two years looks to be particularly dramatic, heading towards a fall of at least 20%.

Is wine doomed?