(TDB) - The drinks industry today is flooded with tools and market analysis to help the trade understand more about their customers than ever before.

Whether you’re revamping your pub wine list, hosting the ladies who lunch or refreshing City clientele, there’s data out there offering advice on how to satisfy just about any demographic or emerging trend you care to imagine. Sometimes though, it can be just as informative to ditch the research papers and simply take a look at the real life people around you. the drinks business has carried out its own informal observation of everyone from Rioja lovers to Champagne quaffers and compiled these portraits of 10 modern consumers based on their wine preference.

The Sauvignon Blanc drinker

Caroline gets a text from Jenny telling her there’s 25% off The Ned at Majestic. She mounts the pavement outside the warehouse on her way home from the school run, children still in the car, and the nice assistant somehow manages to squeeze three cases into a boot already stuffed full of packed lunch boxes, swimming kit and a rather put out dachshund.

It’s not even as though Caroline’s a big wine drinker, but there’s just something about that New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc she can’t resist. Her husband makes wry similes about catnip on his return from the office as she explains that there just wasn’t room in the car to stock up on his favourite Côtes du Rhône too.

He becomes even less thrilled upon realising that his ice tray has been removed from the freezer to allow for some high-speed bottle chilling for as soon as the children have had their tea.

The Malbec drinker

Ben’s girlfriend dumped him last week but, wounded pride aside, he’s not that bothered. It means he can hit Hawksmoor hard with his City colleagues tonight and smash out a bottle of Argentina’s finest with his 400g slab of prime rib-eye.

Of course, if they’re trying to win over a client then someone will take the plunge and flex the company Amex on a Napa cult Cabernet, but Ben gets just as much bang for someone else’s buck on those heady, meaty Malbecs that just ooze gauchos, the great outdoors and the sort of flame-grilled cow flesh his own barbequing efforts somehow never quite deliver. At the end of the meal there’s plenty of talk of heading into Soho, but all that protein and alcohol has taken its toll. Ben shifts uncomfortably in his chair and mentally drafts the text to say his “shoulder injury” is going to keep him off the rugby pitch for another week.