50 glbuttes a year? That's less than one per week. I would guess that that's the average for all Americans, not just wine drinkers.
"Per capita wine consumption in the United States in 1995 was: 2.13 gallons-adult"
which is close to your 2 gallons per year and for all adults, not just wine drinkers. Of course, the average (mean) is more meaningful if you have the standard deviation of the distribution. There's a lot of good statistical information about wine consumption at Table 2 gives the average and standard deviation of wine share but I'll have to read this a few more times while sober to fully understand it. I cross-posted to alt.sci.math.probability and sci.stat.math to see if any of the stat wizards there could read anything into this. It looks like the US-Canada share is increasing while the standard deviation as a ratio to mean is decreasing, indicating a tightening up of the wine consumption trends. (I really like the wine consumption by labreastude graphs.)
Another interesting fact from that site:
"The approximate ratio of beer advertising to wine advertising is: 10 to 1"
Which is in the neighborhood of your 24 gallons of beer to 2 gallons of wine per year, or 12-1. It looks like it pays to advertise.
Paul
