Does Gallo produce 1% of the world's wine?

It is often said that the world’s largest wine producer only makes 1% of the total annual production of wine, which is illustrative of wine’s highly fragmented market structure. By comparison, Coca-Cola owns about 50% of the global soft drinks market, while Anheuser-Busch have a 28% share of the global beer market.

However, it is not so easy to calculate the market share of Gallo because they don’t release production figures (as a family-owned company, they are not obliged to publish such data whereas listed corporations such as Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch are).

Even so, several estimates of Gallo’s production exist. The Drinks Business puts it at 15 million 9-litre cases in 2016, while Wine-Searcher says it was 81.7 million 9-litre cases in 2012. To work out what percentage of global production this is, we can use the OIV figures [pdf] which tell us that there were 258 million hectolitres of wine produced in 2012 and 268.8 in 2016.

Here’s the maths for the 2012 figures:

• Gallo production: 81.7 x 9 = 735.3 million litres = 7.3m hectolitres

• Annual production: 258m hectolitres

• As a percentage, that would mean Gallo made 2.83% of the world’s wine

For the 2016 figures:

• Gallo production: 15 x 9 = 135 million litres = 1.3m hectolitres

• Annual production: 268.8m hectolitres

• As a percentage, that would mean Gallo made 0.48% of the world’s wine

These are only estimates - and they are quite different - but it seems fair to say that Gallo produces somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the world’s annual wine production. Either way, this still makes the industry highly fragmented, with millions of smaller wine producers around the world each accounting for just a minuscule fraction of total global production.