Drinks Insider

Ian Ford arrived in China in 1995, started importing wine in 1999, and has spent the decades since watching the market transform from an expat novelty into one of the world’s most significant markets. He now runs Nimbility, an export management and market development operation with teams across Asia Pacific, and in this conversation he offers a detailed account of where the China wine market actua...

Brace yourself! Professor Simone Loose has some truth bombs to drop. She holds the Chair in Business Economics of the Wine and Beverage Sector at Hochschule Geisenheim in Germany, where her institute has spent over 35 collecting financial data from wine estates. What she sees is not encouraging: customer bases shrinking at more than 4% a year, half of participating businesses unable to pay their o...

Simon Farr has spent 50 years in the wine trade, most of that on things everyone else considered unnecessary, premature, or mildly alarming. He co-founded Bibendum in 1982 on the then-radical idea of cutting out middlemen and selling directly from producer to consumer. He built Cru World Wine on the equally unfashionable premise that price transparency and digital platforms were coming for fine wi...

Spiros Malandrakis, industry manager for alcohol drinks at Euromonitor International, has spent more than two decades watching the beverage industry expand, and is now watching it contract. In this wide-ranging conversation, he discusses what he calls the "permacrisis" gripping global drinks, arguing that the cyclical downturn the industry keeps hoping to ride out may already be something far more...

Celebrity partnerships in alcohol have a mixed track record. When a star is genuinely invested — creatively involved, personally passionate, publicly committed — the results can be transformative. When the celebrity is simply under contract, doing a weekly Instagram post and little else, the partnership quietly dies. So when Carlsberg announced that Robert Pattinson would become the face of 1664 B...

Kirk French teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses in the United States. His so-called “Booze and Culture” course at Penn State, which covers the anthropology of alcohol, attracts 700 students a time. From him, they learn how fermented beverages reveal fundamental truths about human culture. From milking horses to create traditional Mongolian airag, to excavating beer cans at footba...

Bread & Butter is a rare bright spot in a category full of nervous wine producers. Caitlin Vartain Ward explains how the brand grew by treating wine as an easy everyday choice rather than a subject people must study. We talk through the origins of the Don't Overthink It campaign, the research behind a message that sounds obvious, and why understanding consumers matters more than heritage story...

Jefferies beverage analyst Ed Mundy unpacks why alcohol’s post-pandemic slowdown isn’t a single story but a whole world of pressure. There are the macro shocks like tariffs and foreign exchange. The health and wellness trend. The shifting social role of alcohol. And a big question about whether the industry is doing itself any favours in its approach to marketing and innovation. In this conversati...

Ready to hear marketing folklore dismantled? Justin Cohen from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute takes the myths apart, one by one. In this episode of Drinks Insider,  we talk about why mental availability wins out over awareness, how to prioritise category entry points, and why the law of double jeopardy means small brands should stop chasing “loyalty” and start recruiting light and occasional buyers....

What can dog food teach you about the wine market? Heidi Scheid was walking through the supermarket in 2019 when she noticed that there was a low sugar, ‘better for you’ version of absolutely everything — including dog food. The result of her insight is the blockbuster wine Sunny With a Chance of Flowers, which is 9% abv, zero sugar and barely any calories, but which has regularly scored 90 points...

It’s the midnight idea that launched a sensation — Zoncello, the “it” drink of summer 2023 that’s now an established classic. Micallef, a former electrician turned restaurateur and winemaker, created a limoncello/Prosecco spritz that hit the sweet spot between low-alcohol refreshment, Italian nostalgia, and post-lockdown escapism. From the restaurant floor to Dan Murphy’s shelves to Fresh Hippo’s...

Nicholas Crampton has pulled off what many in wine say can’t be done: turning a small redundancy pay out into a multi-million dollar wine juggernaut. As co-founder of Fourth Wave Wines, Nick has mastered the art of “trend-first, retail-ready” wine: spotting shifts in London, Paris or the Hamptons, adapting them to mainstream shelves, and negotiating hard with Australian retail giants like Dan Murp...

Kate Herbert used to sell cereal and pet food at General Mills and J.M. Smucker. Now she’s in wine, where the budgets are smaller, the competition is insane (110,000 SKUs in the US alone), and the glamour wears off the moment you look behind the curtain. Her first year on the job produced something unusual: Ranch Wine. It looks like an RTD, comes in at 11% ABV, and tastes like pineapple, strawberr...

How did US wine lose the plot — and a whole generation of new consumers? Cory Assink and Zeke Blattler, co-founders of Los Cuernos, explain what happened and how they’re rebuilding the on-trade wine category, one consumer trial at a time. They discuss the incentive failures of the three-tier system, why on-premise margins bred stale product and bad value, and how beer distributors outmanoeuvred wi...

There’s a wine downturn going on, and yet The Wine Group, America’s second-largest wine company, is snapping up brands like the market is expanding. Felicity Carter speaks with CEO John Sutton, who explains why he remains bullish on wine even as headlines warn of slowdown. Earlier this year, The Wine Group bought a suite of Constellation Brands labels, including Meiomi, Robert Mondavi Private Sele...

How did a scrappy idea born in a London garage turn into one of the world’s most recognisable oat milk brands? From the early days of KeepCup to building the first shelf-stable cold brew, Stuart shares the hard truths about entrepreneurship in food and drink — wafer-thin margins, constant reinvention, and the sheer expense of creating a new category. Their conversation dives into the evolution of...

What actually happens when the alcohol industry gets a seat at the global health table? In this episode, Julian Braithwait, the former UK ambassador to the UN and now Director General of the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking, lays out how international alcohol policy is made and contested. From WHO mandates to temperance NGOs and the upcoming UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs, this wide-...

Allison Luvera, co-founder of Juliet, joins Drinks Insider to talk about how she  built a premium boxed wine brand in the US. She reveals how pandemic insights led to launching Eco-Magnum, how her background in fashion and at Pernod Ricard shaped strategy, and the reality of creating a new wine packaging format. Allison explains fundraising challenges, distribution hurdles, and why direct-to-consu...

What happens when two friends in their twenties get fed up with syrupy energy drinks and decide to invent a caffeinated water that actually tastes like water? Orka founders Michael Moriarty and Nash Hale join Drinks Insider to talk about their journey from college roommates to beverage entrepreneurs. They reveal how they raised $355K in friends-and-family money, endured a year of catastrophic prod...

What kind of founder quits a high-paying tech job to launch a single-SKU wine brand in an unfamiliar package — and manages to raise $1.4 million to do it? In this episode, Felicity talks to Daniel Rodriguez, founder of Currently Wine Co., a Sauvignon Blanc from California’s Central Coast packaged in an aluminium bottle. The packaging isn’t just a gimmick: it’s core to the bigger mission of lowerin...

Christian Miller, Research Director at the Wine Market Council and founder of Full Glass Research, joins Felicity Carter to explore changes in wine consumption. With decades of market research behind him, Christian outlines how economic, cultural, and demographic shifts are shaping the way Americans approach wine. From the decline of traditional wine drinkers to the rise of hybrid and alternative...

How can wine businesses innovate while remaining true to tradition? Jonathan Steyn, convener of the Wine Business Management and Hospitality Leadership program at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, offers a way forward, grounded in both practical experience and academic rigour. An expert in market creation and innovation, he addresses everything from overcoming traditional mi...

It gets you drunk, hungover and sick. And yet we go back for more. What’s the attraction of alcohol? According to Professor Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Stumbled, and Danced Our Way to Civilization, alcohol is the key to civilisation. In this insightful episode of Drinks Insider, he tells host Felicity Carter that much of what we think about alcohol is false. We did not, for...

Who created the Finnish long drink? When did Finns start drinking wine? And how does wine get into their glasses? At a time of market turbulence, when wineries are looking for new export markets, why not consider Finland? And for anybody interested, the person to talk to is Heidi Mäkinen MW, Portfolio Manager and Partner at Viinitie importing company. She’s the former Best Sommelier of Finland and...

The first time Natalie Wang drank wine she found it ‘rancid’. Today, Natalie is Southeast Asia’s leading voice for the wine trade. She began as a hard news journalist for outlets like the International Herald Tribune and Reuters, before moving to work with James Suckling, which opened her eyes to the world of fine wine. In 2019 she founded Vino-Joy, a wine trade magazine based in Hong Kong, which...