Most wine in the US is bought by millennials

Millennials consumed more wine in the U.S. than any other group.

Good news.  Not only does drinking wine helps keep you young, if you’re sipping that never-ending glass of red, it probably means you're not ancient either.

According to new research from Wine Market Council, detailed in Wine Spectator,  young people in their 20s and early-to-mid 30s now drink almost half the wine bought in the U.S. And among high-frequency wine drinkers under the age of 30, women are out-purchasing men two-to-one when it comes to wine.

Researchers looked at all ages of "high frequency" drinkers, those who drank 3.1 glasses of wine per sitting, and found millennials drank more than other generations. Baby Boomers made up 38 percent of regular drinkers and Gen Xers made up 20 percent. Millennials, defined as the 79 million Americans ages 21 to 38, drank 159.6 million cases of wine in 2015—an average of two cases per person.

And drilling down another level, among those frequent drinkers under 30, two-thirds were women.

"Wine is winning with women," the council concluded.

They’re not drinking just any cheap bottle, either.  According to research, 17 percent of millennials spent more than $20 for a bottle of wine in the past month.  Neither Gen X nor the Baby Boomers came close to that kind of spending.

And where are they getting the wine?  Millennials were less likely than Baby Boomers to buy wine from California, the most popular provenance among wine drinkers, opting instead to buy wine from all over, Wine Spectator noted.

And, of course, over half of wine-drinking millennials said they talk about wine on Facebook.