The Most Avid U.S. Wine Cities

(Wine-Searcher) - Wine is the drink of choice in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, a new survey shows.

Beer continues to be the no. 1 beverage in most of the nation’s major cities, no doubt buoyed by the craft beer movement. However, wine is king in the Big Apple and on the West coast, according to a Harris poll of more than 2,000 adults living in America’s 10 most populous cities.

Ralph Sands, a wine specialist at K&L Wines, told Wine-Searcher: “New York, San Francisco, and L.A. have always been the big markets for wine.”

What’s more, other cities on the East Coast – Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Boston – join NYC in being more likely than their West Coast counterparts to indulge in imported wines. Boston comes top in this category, with 40 percent of local respondents saying they drink wine from abroad.

Sands said: “The real answer to that is that until the last 20 years or so, 90 percent of wine arrived at the east coast because that’s where the big ports were, so that trend has always been entrenched.”

With 90 percent of the country’s wine produced in the Golden State, West Coasters are less likely to drink foreign wines, according to the poll (in Los Angeles, for example, the figure is just 26 percent). However, Sands believes that picture is changing, with a greater range of imported wines now available and “more open-mindedness."

At the other end of the scale, adults in Texas are the least likely to drink wine or any other type of alcohol. Around 30 percent of Texans said that they never indulge – perhaps due to religious beliefs, as well as strict laws regulating the sale of alcohol. Of those Texans who do drink alcohol at least several times a year, just four in 10 drink wine, compared to 70 percent of New Yorkers and 69 percent of Bostonians.

Nevertheless, Sands said the largest cities in Texas were “great markets: affluent and well-educated.”