When It Comes to Drinking Wine in America, South Dakota Can’t Keep Up

South Dakota is never going to be mistaken for wine country, but we do have a surprising number of really good wineries in the Mount Rushmore State.

Not enough apparently for us to drink more of the stuff, because when it comes to wine consumption per capita, South Dakota is near the bottom in the United States.

Only Wyoming, West Virginia, and North Dakota pop the cork on a bottle of wine less than we do, according to the website VinePair.

As for the biggest wine drinkers per capita in America, it's not surprising that the home of the fabled "Wine Country', California, leads the way followed by Florida, New York, Texas, and Illinois.

Despite coming in near the bottom of the overall pack, we are drinking more win than ever in South Dakota.

Statistics from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism show that after an all-time low in wine consumption in the mid-1990s, South Dakotans now drink more win than ever before, nearly double over the past 20 years.

Beer and spirits continue to be our drinks of choice in the Mount Rushmore State, although our consumption of suds has been declining slightly over the past decade while our appetite for the hard stuff is back at its late 70s levels after plummeting in the late 90s.