Wine Lovers Put President-Elect Barack Obama in Office

The presidential election is over, and President-Elect Barack Obama is busy interviewing potential cabinet members, but political experts will spend the next four years analyzing the election returns. A popular technique among political consultants in the past two races is microtargeting—looking for likely supporters by analyzing what they eat, what cars they drive, where they shop, even what magazines they subscribe to. But one factor they may want to be looking at is, which voters drink wine? Unfiltered's crack election team has crunched the numbers, and it's clear that states that like wine voted for Obama in overwhelming numbers. Nine of the top 10 wine-consuming states voted for Obama—only Texas broke rank and voted for Sen. John McCain. Looking further down the list, 20 of the top 25 wine-consuming states went for the President-to-be. In fact, the District of Columbia and the 28 states that voted for Obama drank 79.7 percent of the 300 million cases of wine consumed in the U.S. in 2007. (Wine consumption numbers by state come from the recently-released The U.S. Wine Market: Impact Databank Review and Forecast, 2008 edition, published by Wine Spectator's parent company.)