(WineEconomist) - The Economist magazine’s current issue includes a brief  article on “Booze Around the World: The Changing Demography of Drinks,” which features  this interesting info-graphic.

It is interesting to see that alcohol consumption per person (third graph) is experiencing a type of convergence in the main markets that some globalization theorists have predicted more generally due to falling income disparities among leading nations and international cultural exchanges that take place via media, immigration and tourism.

Although the graphs are about alcohol in general, this convergent pattern also true for wine, with rising consumption in the new world and falling use in the old world (including Argentina, which is an old world wine country located here in the new world).

The Economist graphs and related story raise a lot of questions. For me the most interesting thing is that, while overall alcohol consumption shows surprising stability (the first graph) the who, what when, where, how and why of consumption displays surprising change (the third graph illustrates the dramatic shift in who and where, for example).