Treasury Wine Estates, one of the world’s biggest wine companies, has announced it is about to cut more than 40 brands from its portfolio, including names with deep roots in history, like Seppelts. Instead, it will concentrate on 10 ‘regional heroes’, and three main brands: Penfolds, DAOU and Matua.

In this latest episode, Lulie and Felicity look at what this decision means. Lulie argues the move is overdue and rational, because consumers buy relevance, not heritage, and a company carrying 40 underperforming brands is carrying 40 liabilities it doesn't need. Felicity pushes back, arguing that some of this is cultural vandalism — since wine is more than a branded good. It’s also cultural heritage.

It raises a fundamental question: should companies optimise purely for consumers, or do they have a responsibility to history, even when it doesn’t produce commercial results? Lulie and Felicity both have strong opinions and sparks fly as they argue over whether wine is just a business like any other, or an institution with a debt to the past.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Global wine consumption fell another 2.7% in 2025 —part of a cumulative 14% drop since 2018. Across the top 20 markets, wine volumes are down more than 20% since 2019. That’s one in five bottles, gone.

But Lulie presents the case for why wine remains relevant, from Gen Z participation rates to the cyclical nature of drinks categories, and why she’s genuinely optimistic about the case for wine.

And she brings receipts. Gin had a moral panic, a long exile, and a renaissance. RTDs went from wine coolers to alcopops to canned cocktails. Categories don't die — they find new occasions, new formats, and new generations who need something their parents didn't drink. The question for wine isn't whether it has a future. It's whether enough of the industry will ask the right questions before the consolidation wave hits. Lulie and Felicity have got wine in the fridge, and they’re ready to debate.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Global wine consumption recently hit its lowest point since 1961, the same year most people were filling jerry cans with wine from the local cooperative and serving it for dinner. In this episode, Felicity takes the first half of a two-part debate with Lulie Halstead, making the case that wine's extraordinary 50-year mass-market expansion was a demographic accident. The baby boomers brought prosperity, leisure, food culture and travel — and wine rose with their prosperity. Now the boomers are stepping back, and the impact on the world of wine is enormous.

But decline wasn’t inevitable. The success of Prosecco, rosé, and sparkling were sending loud signals that were being ignored.

Lulie pushes back throughout with data, marketing logic and genuine optimism — and in a fortnight she gets her turn to make the commercial case for wine's future. Spoiler: she's got a different point of view.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Lulie and Felicity touched a nerve with their recent debate on storytelling — so they decided to go one step further. Lulie brought along a full-page Sunday Times ad for the Sunday Times Wine Club with all the ingredients of good storytelling — and then they proceeded to tear it apart. They discussed why a lyrical opening about schist and shale is the wrong beginning for a newspaper ad, what WIIFM means, and what a properly structured version of this campaign would look like if someone had put the stakes at the front where they belong.

Next up, Lulie analyses the run of recent RTD acquisitions, including the Finnish Long Drink ($325 million to Mark Anthony Brands), BuzzBalls (to Sazerac), Beatbox (to AB InBev), and Monaco Cocktails (to Molson Coors). The strategic implications are that the biggest players in the drinks industry have largely stopped trying to build new brands from scratch and are instead buying proven momentum. They’re buying products that have already solved the hard problems of format, occasion, and distribution. What does this say about big company innovation, and why do RTDs have a structural advantage in convenience-driven markets? And, finally, why are so many people buying drinks in Tetra Pak and sneaking them places?

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Felicity and Lulie tear apart the wine industry's most cherished marketing belief: that the thing that will drive more sales and loyalty is better storytelling. Felicity, a guest lecturer in brand storytelling at the University of Cape Town Business School, argues that real storytelling — structured around stakes, reversals, and the narrative templates that have powered human communication since the savanna — is genuinely powerful. Lulie the marketer, armed with Ehrenberg-Bass, the work of Daniel Kahneman and a well-preserved 30-year-old Patagonia fleece, argues that storytelling is not only not a good method for building brand awareness and driving choice, but that it’s actively counterproductive.

Along the way there are detours through hunter-gatherer communities in the Philippines, the neurochemistry of charitable giving, Max Schubert making Penfolds Grange in secret while his employers told him to stop, and why the Widow Clicquot's entire legacy works as brand storytelling, even though almost nobody knows the mechanics of how it was assembled.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Non-alcoholic drinks are the industry's favourite growth story right now, but Felicity and Lulie begin by asking the question nobody in the trade wants to answer: is this actually a health movement, or is it simply the drinks industry colonising new occasions? The data tells a more complicated story than the headlines suggest. Much of the category's growth is coming not from drinkers cutting back but from people upgrading what they reach for when they would previously have had a soft drink — which raises the uncomfortable possibility that the no-alc boom is less about sobriety and more about margin expansion.

To put the current moment in context, the conversation travels back through some unexpected history — prohibition-era soda fountains, and a little-known 75-year ban on agave spirits in Mexico — to show that the tension between alcohol, abstinence, and commerce is nothing new, and that category disruptions of this kind tend to follow recognisable patterns. From there, Felicity and Lulie break down the state of play inside the no-alc segment itself: why non-alcoholic beer has genuinely cracked the brief and earned its place on the shelf, why non-alcoholic spirits are still working out what they are and who they are for, and why alcohol-free wine faces a structural problem that no amount of clever winemaking has yet resolved.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Lulie and Felicity are back to talking about the drinks news! And the news is big. Diageo's new CEO Sir Dave Lewis (also known as “Drastic Dave”) has delivered his first major investor presentation, outlining many of the problems facing Diageo, including a portfolio  overweighted at the expensive end of a market. Felicity and Lulie dig into what Lewis's blunt assessment reveals about the state of premiumisation as a strategy — and whether the industry's dominant narrative of the past decade has been quietly masking structural decline.

But not every brand is struggling. Beatbox, the brightly coloured Texan party punch that sells for around $5 a carton, has just passed $300 million in annual US retail sales — and it got there by ignoring almost every convention the drinks industry holds dear.

Add to that Jägermeister's quietly impressive 2025, built on a fruit extension that has sold five million bottles in under a year, and a picture emerges of a market fracturing along price and purpose lines. The episode also touches on resealable Tetra Paks, drink spiking, the unit-of-alcohol economics that explain why cheap drinks are winning, and why someone in Belize is mixing whisky with local rum and calling it Risky.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

A/Prof Justin Cohen from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute takes wine marketing myths apart, one by one. He talks 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. Cohen maps the mechanics of growth across wine and beyond, from media choices to where your brand physically shows up, and explains why reach beats narrow targeting when you’re trying to get from zero to one purchase.

We also get into distinctiveness versus differentiation, portfolio cohesion, and the duplication-of-purchase reality that your customers are also someone else’s customers. Cohen shows how to design tastings that encode the brand not just the occasion, how to defend against retailer private labels with consistent distinctive assets, and how to adapt when affluent Boomers age out and younger buyers refuse waiting lists.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Lulie Halstead is on sabbatical. While she's away, she's chosen her favourite episodes from Drinks Insider to feature on A Question of Drinks and she explains why she's so impressed by them.

Her first pick is an interview with Marian Leitner-Waldman, founder of Archer Roose canned wines, which she says is a masterclass of brand building.

Entrepreneur and co-founder Marian Leitner-Waldman has single handedly overcome all the problems facing the wine industry. Archer Roose has a thriving audience of young consumers, who can’t get enough of high-quality wine in cans and bagnums, which appear in more than 6,000 outlets.

The reason that sales are up 35% year-on-year? The brand is built on a combination of high-quality wine, total transparency, and plenty of data.

In this episode, Marian talks about:

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Are people leaving alcohol behind, or are they simply drinking less and less often?

In this episode of A Question of Drinks, Felicity Carter and Lulie Halstead dig into the data behind moderation. Drawing on IWSR, Gallup, Barclays, WHO and FT reporting, they unpack three forces reshaping consumption:

First, health and identity. Moderation is normalising. Abstinence peaks are flattening. Smartwatches, sleep data and calorie awareness are influencing behaviour — but not driving mass teetotalism.

Second, economics. Younger consumers are not morally superior — they are financially constrained. Alcohol remains a discretionary spend. Fewer nights out and tighter wallets are doing much of the heavy lifting behind declining volumes.

Third, chemistry. GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic may suppress desire itself, potentially altering drinking behaviour at a biological level. Cannabis, by contrast, appears largely additive rather than a substitute.

The conclusion? People have not stopped drinking. They are recalibrating.

Meet Your Hosts:

Lulie Halstead founded and led international consumer research and strategy consultancy Wine Intelligence, and led it to a successful PE exit. Today she is a renowned global beverage alcohol and wine sector specialist, focused on consumer behaviour, strategy, retail and hospitality. An accomplished keynote speaker, she has spoken at more than 70 international events over the past 20 years.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.