A Question of Drinks

Like it or not, AI is now the gatekeeper between your wine or spirits brand and your consumer. So how do you ensure that when consumers go looking for a product, that you come up in the recommendations?

Felicity and Lulie do a deep dive into the evidence and surface with the answer as to why AI recommends some products and not others. And the news is good for small brands — structure your data properly, and AI might recommend you over big brands with huge digital footprints.

But should brands be using AI to create their marketing in the first place? Felicity and Lulie debate when AI works, when it produces obvious slop, and why AI can make consumers so angry that they start vandalising public advertising. Plus, Coca-Cola’s controversial AI Christmas ads, the possible return of the wine critic, Felicity’s war on German flies, and the critical question of whether being polite to your AI will save you when the robots rebel.

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.

Why do cool drinks feel so refreshing? And how did coldness become an essential selling point for drinks?

The link between chilled drinks and refreshment is so common today that it feels natural — but it took 2,000 years of innovation to get there.

In this entertaining, Freakonomics-style episode, hosts Felicity and Lulie trace how drinks went from being served at room temperature, to being so cold it’s hard to distinguish the flavours. Their story takes in snow-cooled water, a Bostonian entrepreneur who built a global trade empire from pond ice, and an Australian printer who noticed that typeface became cooler after he cleaned it.

Along the way they race how Champagne ended up in silver ice buckets and how Coca-Cola’s decision to sell branded $12 coolers to store owners changed the world of drinks forever — and what this means for refreshment in a heating world.

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.

How did the spritz take over every pub, bar and supermarket this summer? Is it a fad — or is it the result of clever marketing?

While Aperol dates back to 1919, the seeds of its success were planted in 2003, when Campari bought the brand and introduced the aperitivo moment to Germany. But, luckily for them, their bright orange drink coincided with the expanding of Prosecco production.

While the timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous, the Aperol spritz became a victim of its own success. Campari hadn’t just built a brand — they’re introduced a whole new drinking occasion to the market, and competitors soon moved in. Today, drinkers can choose between the Aperol spritz, the Hugo, the limoncello spritz, and even the tequila spritz.

But how that happened is a highly entertaining story, involving a millionaire enclave in Germany, a bored bar tender in northern Italy, and an Australian winemaker who had a run in with the Australian Taxation Office.

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 has just returned from a conference in Dublin devoted to drinking studies, an academic field that examines alcohol's role in history and culture from angles the wine world rarely considers. This prompts Lulie to reveal the ordeal she suffered at a recent tasting, where the audience had to wait for 42 agonising minutes before tasting a single wine. That's the signal for Lulie and Felicity to start arguing about whether wine is boring. Does one bad presenter indict a whole industry? Is reverence for fine wine earned or performed? And who is the star of a wine tasting — the wine or the consumer? 

Along the way they cover the Robert Hodgson wine judging experiment, Orley Ashenfelter's rainfall-based vintage predictions and the fury it once provoked, the 1976 Judgment of Paris and what it did and didn't prove about prestige, and a run of case studies from La Vieille Ferme's accidental rebrand as "chicken wine" to Archer Roos and emotion-first advertising. Who is right in the end? And what's your own opinion? There's a lot to unpack.

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.

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.