[pedrocr]

>So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit.

By your numbers France produces 145% of what the US does while having 20% of the population. So per-capita it produces a lot more wine. On the other hand the French drink more wine. I found a table of consumption per capita[1] and looked up the populations of France and the USA on wolfram alpha. The end result is that France produces 142% of it's consumption, while the US produces 95% of its consumption.

So the French need to export their wine to find a market, and that's probably only easy for the high-end stuff. That should make entry-level but still good wine easy to buy. That's certainly our experience in Portugal as well. It's one of the barometers I use for the state of our wine industry. If I can still find good 2-5€ bottles of wine on the supermarket it means we're still not good enough at exporting it.

[1] http://www.wineinstitute.org/files/2010_Per_Capita_Wine_Cons...