Wine from Burgundy, beer from Bavaria, sake from Japan, tequila from Jalisco, and the tea, coffee and kava that dozens of countries name as their national drink. One map of where the world's drinks come from and who makes them, built from open data, with honest gaps where the record is thin.
Ask where a drink comes from and you usually get a place: Champagne, Cognac, Rioja, Islay, Jerez, Jalisco. Drinks are tied to places more tightly than almost anything else we buy, sometimes by law. So I tried to put the world's drinks on one map: wines and their appellations, beers and their styles, ciders and perries, spirits of every kind, sake and other rice drinks, the traditional drinks such as mead, kvass, pulque and palm wine, the brands and the people who make them, and the drink each country holds up as its own.
The map below draws on four open sources. Wikidata gives 27,322 named drinks with a country (types and styles such as tequila or Kölsch, and brands and individual products), plus 6,044 wineries, breweries and distilleries. The EU register of geographical indications (eAmbrosia) gives 1,985 protected names for wines, spirits, beers and ciders. OpenStreetMap gives 32,425 mapped producers. And two English Wikipedia lists give the national drink of 201 countries and the national liquor of 90. Choose a drink, then click a country, a region or a dot.
Wikipedia's list of national drinks is a crowd's answer to a pub question, and it is more sober than you might expect. Of the 201 countries in it, 90 (45%) list a drink without alcohol first: tea in 19, coffee in 16, and the rest everything from mate in Argentina and lassi in India to kava across the Pacific. Among alcoholic drinks named first, spirits of every kind lead (47 countries, brandies and fruit spirits most of all), then beer (12), cocktails such as Brazil's caipirinha (10) and traditional drinks (9).
What each country names first
The first drink in each country's entry in Wikipedia's 'List of national drinks' (201 countries), by kind. Hover a bar for countries.
The separate list of national liquors covers 90 countries and is a map of distilling traditions: rakija and its cousins across the Balkans, arak around the eastern Mediterranean, rum in the Caribbean, baijiu in China, soju in Korea, shochu in Japan, tequila and mezcal in Mexico, pisco in Peru and Chile. The most named drinks across both lists are rum (17 countries) and coffee (13).
Wine is where drink and place are welded together by law. The EU register holds 1,665 protected wine names, and they are overwhelmingly European: Italy has 522, France 442, Spain 150 and Greece 147. I could place 996 of the 1,985 drink names (50%) on the map, through the place Wikidata links to each one or a place of the same name in the same country. The region with the most placed wine names is Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in France (70), home of Burgundy's village appellations.
Protected wine names by country
Wine GIs (PDO and PGI) in the EU eAmbrosia register, registered or applied for, including GIs of non-EU countries protected in the EU.
OpenStreetMap's mappers have tagged 17,682 wineries. France (3,198) and Germany (2,803) lead, and the single busiest region is Rhineland-Palatinate (1,980), home of the Mosel, Pfalz and Rheinhessen wine regions: a sign of how keen German mappers are as well as how many small estates there are. The grapes themselves have origins too: Wikidata gives a country of origin for 1,108 of its 2,830 grape varieties, 800 of them Italian, which probably says more about how thoroughly Italian varieties have been entered in Wikidata than about Italy.
Here the open record splits in two. Wikidata knows 20,381 named beers, almost all of them individual products rather than styles (99%), and 78% come from just three countries: the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium. That is not a ranking of beer cultures but of who has typed beers into Wikidata: the makers with the most beers in it are small brewers such as Moersleutel (402 beers) and Omnipollo (381).
Named beers in Wikidata
Share of 20,381 beers with a country.
Breweries in OpenStreetMap
Share of 11,649 mapped breweries.
The breweries on the ground tell a broader story. Of the 11,649 breweries in OpenStreetMap the United States has 3,788, then France, the United Kingdom and Germany, and the busiest single region is Bavaria (387). Protected beer names are few, 25 in the register, 19 of them Czech or German: České pivo, Bayerisches Bier, Kölsch, Münchener Bier.
Spirits are the most varied family and the most thinly recorded. Wikidata names 594 spirits with a country, from 88 countries, and the register protects 273 spirit names, 143 of them brandies and fruit spirits (Bulgarian grozdova rakya, Hungarian pálinka, Italian grappa) and 59 liqueurs. OpenStreetMap has 3,062 distilleries; the region with the most is Scotland (177), as anyone who has driven through Speyside would guess.
Protected spirit names by kind
273 spirit GIs in the EU register, sorted by words in their names (brandy, grappa, rakija, liqueur, gin, ouzo...).
Some of the oldest drinks leave the faintest trace in open data. Wikidata lists 88 sake breweries, 87 of them in Japan, and only 21 named rice drinks with a country, such as sake and huangjiu. Cider and perry have 15 protected names, from Normandy and Brittany to Asturias, the Basque Country and the cider counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Kvass, pulque, chicha, tej, boza, kumis and palm wine appear as types of drink with a country, and mead not even that, but almost never as products or producers: much of it is made at home or sold in markets, not catalogued.
Put every source together and Europe holds 65% of the 67,755 records, North America 27%, and Africa 0.7%. That is not a map of what the world drinks. It is a map of registers, of mappers, and of the people who type drinks into Wikidata. The protected-name register is the EU's; craft brewers and their fans catalogue beer; traditional drinks made at home leave no paperwork.
Records by continent
All 67,755 records: named drinks, producers in Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, and protected names.
Wikidata knows 8,326 American beers by name, and Ethiopian tej only as a word.
Named drinks. I took every Wikidata class below 'alcoholic beverage' and every item that is an instance of one, plus alcohol brands, and rum, kvass, kumis and tuba, which Wikidata does not connect to that class. Each drink gets a family from its place in Wikidata's class tree (whisky, gin, rum, agave spirits, vodka, brandy, anise, East Asian spirits, liqueurs, other spirits; wine; beer; cider and perry; sake and rice drinks; traditional drinks). Cocktails and other mixed drinks are left out. Its country is its country of origin, else its country, else the country of its location or maker; its point is its own coordinates, else its location's, else its maker's. A brand whose maker's head office is abroad is not drawn there. 19,527 of 27,322 named drinks have a point.
Protected names. The EU eAmbrosia register lists geographical indications for wine, spirits, aromatised wine and food. I kept the wine and spirit GIs and the food GIs whose customs code is beer, wine, cider and other fermented drinks, or spirits, leaving out cancelled and rejected names. A GI is placed through the Wikidata item that carries its eAmbrosia ID, or through a Wikidata place with the same name in the same country. Name matching is approximate: a few names will have landed on a namesake village, so treat a single dot with care.
Producers. Wikidata wineries, breweries, distilleries, sake breweries and cider mills, and OpenStreetMap features tagged as a winery, brewery, distillery or cider maker. OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers and is much fuller in some countries than others.
National drinks. The country lines of Wikipedia's 'List of national drinks' and 'List of national liquors', with each linked drink classified through Wikidata. Some countries list several drinks; I show the first. These lists are informal and some entries are unsourced.
Regions. Points are placed in Natural Earth states and provinces, merged into regions for Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and England, as in the sister study of food.
What this is not. It is not a map of what people drink or how much. It counts records, not litres, and it does not rank drinks. Coverage differs enormously between countries and families, as section 07 shows. Names of drinks and brands are used only to say where they come from; no logos are shown, and nothing here is a recommendation to drink.