Cask wine: Describing drinking patterns associated with Australia's cheapest alcohol

In Australia, cask wine is the cheapest alcoholic beverage available, offering the lowest price per standard drink. Despite this, there is little research on the contextual correlates of cask wine consumption. Therefore, the current study aims to describe how cask wine consumption has changed over the last decade. Then, through comparisons between cask and bottled wine, how prices, typical drinking locations, and patterns of consumption differ between the beverages.

Cross-sectional data was drawn from two sources. Four waves of the National Drug Strategy Household Survey were used (2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019) in order to examine consumption trends over time. The International Alcohol Control study (2013) in Australia was additionally used to explore pricing and consumption trends in greater detail.

Cask wine was considerably cheaper than other forms of wine at $0.54 per standard drink (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.45-0.62, p < 0.05). Consumption trends associated with cask wine differed from that of bottled wine, being consumed almost entirely at home and in significantly greater quantity (standard drinks per day 7.8, 95% CI 6.25-9.26, p < 0.05). Among the heaviest drinkers, 13% (95% CI 7.2-18.8, p < 0.05) consumed cask wine as their main drink, compared to 5% (95% CI 3.76-6.24, p < 0.05) consuming bottled wine.

Cask wine drinkers are disproportionately more likely to consume higher amounts of alcohol, paying less per drink doing so compared to bottled wine drinkers. As all cask wine purchases were under $1.30, a minimum unit price may largely affect cask wine purchases, applying to a far smaller proportion of bottled wine.