What Does the World Drink? Wine, Beer, Cider, Spirits, Sake and National Drinks in Wikidata, Wikipedia, the EU Register of Geographical Indications and OpenStreetMap
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Drinks are tied to places more tightly than most things we consume, often by law. I assemble an open world map of where drinks come from, combining four sources: Wikidata, for 27,322 named drinks (types, styles, brands and products) with a country and 6,044 producers; the European Union register of geographical indications (eAmbrosia), for 1,985 protected names of wines, spirits, beers and ciders; OpenStreetMap, for 32,425 wineries, breweries and distilleries; and two English Wikipedia lists, for the national drink of 201 countries and the national liquor of 90. Every drink is assigned a family (wine; beer; cider and perry; ten kinds of spirit; sake and rice drinks; traditional drinks) from the Wikidata class tree or from words in its protected name, and placed in a country and, where possible, a region. The national drink lists are less alcoholic than one might expect: 45% of countries list a drink without alcohol first, tea in 19 and coffee in 16. Protected wine names are concentrated in Italy (522) and France (442). The open record as a whole is a record of who keeps records: 65% of all 67,755 records are European and 0.7% African, and 78% of Wikidata's 20,381 named beers come from three countries. The atlas maps what the open record says about the origins of drinks, not what people drink. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/drinks-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/drinks-map. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/drinks-map/.
Author: Hotham, Tristan
Language: English
Topic: Wine Industry and Tourism
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224342900