America overtakes France

It's official: For the first time in history, Americans drank more wine than the French last year. A leading wine industry consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area reports that Americans are now the world's top wine consumers by volume, besting the French by many millions of bottles.

In 2010, Americans drank 3.96 billion bottles of wine to France's 3.85 billion bottles. Drinking wine has become increasingly popular among the millennial generation of Americans: the 21- to 32-year-old demographic.

Still, to put this all in perspective, the average Frenchman consumes 12.2 gallons of wine per year, compared to only 2.6 gallons for the average American. Vive la différence!