White Wine Fans, Rejoice — Soon You May Get Your Own Emoji

Listen up, wine-os — documenting happy hours might just be about to get easier. In an era when an event is only worth your time if you can get a selfie out of it, emojis are vital. Up until now, white wine drinkers have had to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of an emoji. But those days may be over now thanks to an increasingly likely potential for the release of a highly-anticipated white wine emoji. Credit where credit is due, and if the emoji comes to fruition, most of the credit goes to the manufacturer of wine you likely already drink. Lauren Svoboda of Kendall-Jackson Wines submitted a 15-page proposal to Unicode, imploring the company to add a white wine version of the ever-popular wine emoji to its lineup.

In the proposal, Svodoba explains, "The existing wine glass emoji, depicted as a glass of red wine, does not properly represent one of the most popular and widely consumed adult beverages — white wine." She notes further that the addition of a white wine emoji would actually not be too difficult from a programming perspective: "All three code points in the sequence already exist, thus vendors can implement immediately without waiting for Unicode v12." Is it possible to get a PhD in emoji science? If so, get Svodoba a doctoral hood.

The main argument Svodoba for Kendall-Jackson makes for creating a white wine emoji is that the beverage is just too popular to not be represented in an emojipedia. Honestly, she has a point. According to Svodoba's research, five varieties of wine make up 75 percent of total sales. Of the five, three are red and two are white. But Chardonnay, a white wine, is the top seller. Further, red and white wines are virtually comparable when it comes to sales figures. Approximately 27.4 million cases of red wine and 26 million cases of white wine are sold each year. Not to mention, while wine drinkers are more likely to drink the beverage habitually, compared to red wine drinkers. Seventy-eight percent of regular wine drinkers in the United States prefer white wine, whereas 77 percent of regular wine drinkers in the United States prefer red wine.

Smartphone users currently have the choice of two separate beer emojis. With the lack of a white wine emoji, some may call this abundance of beer options unfair. Though, in fact, this too kind of makes sense. According to a Gallup poll, beer currently outranks wine in terms of popularity; 40 percent of Americans drink beer compared with 30 percent who drink wine. Plus, the percentage of people who consume wine has been steadily increasing for the past two decades, while that of beer has been decreasing. With that said, there is a sparkling wine emoji, despite sparkling wine only making up 8 percent of wine sales nationwide.

Of course, there is no guarantee Unicode will go for the idea of adding a white wine emoji. But maybe at some point, the company has to give. White wine drinkers are certainly here to stay, and they deserve to Chardonnay all day, too.