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 actually stands — not the 2019 version that many exporters are still mentally working from. That means the May 2025 government decree banning alcohol at official functions and its chilling effect on banqueting and gifting, why the post-tariff Australian recovery stalled despite an enthusiastic initial welcome, and what blind tasting clubs run by tattooed twenty-somethings tell us about the generational shift now reshaping Chinese wine culture from the ground up.

Ford also takes the listener on a broader tour of the region: why New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and German Riesling are the wines of the current moment in China, what is driving South Korea‘s growth, why Japan's importers are hunkered down under a yen that has lost nearly half its value against the dollar, and why India remains perpetually five years away from the boom everyone keeps predicting. For producers with limited budgets trying to decide where to focus, Ford has a clear view — and equally clear advice on where not to spend money, including the digital black hole that swallows producers who try to build proprietary audiences from scratch. If you want to understand how Asia actually works for wine right now, this is the episode.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and analyst. 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.

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 owners a living wage, and a generation of producers sitting on land that no longer functions as a retirement plan.

She's mostly talking about Germany but, as she makes clear, its plight is reflected elsewhere. In this conversation Simone traces the structural forces bearing down on wine globally — demographic decline, the retreat from aspirational consumption, climate volatility, the end of cheap debt — and explains why some markets are adapting while others are still debating whether the problem is real.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and analyst. 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.

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 wine whether the trade liked it or not. And now, against a backdrop of collapsing En Primeur trust, margin-squeezed restaurants, and shrinking consumption figures, he is doing it again — betting on aged Piedmont wines and a new hybrid space in Fitzrovia, because he thinks the trade is confusing a cyclical transition with terminal decline.

In this episode, Farr traces the arc of his career from working harvest in post-scandal Bordeaux to delivering Champagne to the oil-rich London nightclubs of the late 1970s, and from Bibendum's founding moment to his current thinking on what a viable wine trade actually looks like in the decade ahead. He is bracingly clear about the structural damage that taxation and over-pricing have done to the on-trade. But he remains one of the few senior figures in wine who is putting his own capital behind a new venture rather than moaning about decline. If you want to understand both where the market broke and where the next opportunities lie, this is the conversation to hear.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and analyst. 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.

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 structural. 

Spiros also argues that alcohol's real problem is an identity crisis: it's a fashion category pretending to be a food category, and it's losing younger consumers partly because their parents made it uncool. He also reveals a concept he's been developing and hasn't yet published — "nihilistic indulgence" — the emerging countertrend to wellness culture, driven by a generation of young people in crisis.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and analyst. 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.

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 Blanc, the obvious question was: which kind of partnership is this?

In this episode, Felicity Carter puts that question directly to Seva Nikolaev, Global Vice President of Premium Brands at Carlsberg. His answer is surprisingly candid. Pattinson wasn't just hired and handed a script — he was in the room (well, via Teams) from the beginning, shaping the creative direction of the campaign and bringing in his own trusted director, Brady Corbett, to helm it. Whether that level of involvement translates into the kind of authentic, enduring brand relationship that actually moves product is the big question running through this conversation.

Along the way, Nikolaev also pulls back the curtain on why 1664 Blanc is one of beer's most unusual stories — a super-premium lager that draws up to 80% of its new customers away from wine, spirits, and other categories entirely — and where he sees premium beer heading as the wider category faces mounting pressure.

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 football tailgates, French uses alcohol as a lens to make anthropology accessible and engaging. His research spans Maya brewing traditions, Appalachian moonshine archaeology, and the social dynamics of college drinking, all while challenging students to understand that alcohol consumption patterns expose socioeconomic status, cultural values, and the universal human desire for social connection and altered consciousness.

In this wide-ranging conversation, French explores why alcohol and agriculture co-evolved, why Native North Americans never developed fermentation traditions, and whether the current push toward abstinence represents a permanent shift or temporary reaction to pandemic-era overconsumption. He argues that America's 21-year-old drinking age removes crucial guardrails that protect young drinkers in other countries, that prohibition movements always stem from fear of what intoxicated people might do when their inhibitions drop, and that cannabis and social media are now substituting for alcohol's traditional role in lowering social anxiety. His conclusion: alcohol is too deeply woven into human culture across millennia to ever disappear, though consumption patterns will continue their historical ebb and flow.

Meet your host:

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer 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 at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.

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 storytelling for attracting new drinkers.

She also challenges the panic narrative with what she actually sees in the data. Bread & Butter is not watching consumers race to the bottom on price in the US and she refuses to cheapen the brand to chase volume. We dig into why the $12 to $15 tier remains a sweet spot, why Chardonnay drinkers are unusually loyal, and why distinct packaging is so important when it comes to retail.

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 conversation, Ed gets specific about what’s working and what isn’t; why some of the fastest-growing US products are cheap and fun; why GLP-1 drugs show a measurable but not catastrophic drag on alcohol; and why non-alcoholic beer has cracked taste and stigma while wine and spirits are still wrestling with the physics of flavour and mouthfeel.

Meet your host:

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer 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 at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.

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. 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 host:

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer 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 at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.

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.

In this lively conversation, she explains how Scheid Family Wines moved up the value chain, from being a grape supplier to a producer of private labels, and then to making its own brands. She talks about business decision-making, from when to create a brand to when to kill it, and what consumers are looking for right now. She also mounts a robust defence of the culture of wine drinking, explains the SKU-rat and goes into detail on their flowers-for-a-year sweepstakes.

You’ll come out the other side understanding what makes a successful wine business tick.

Meet your host:

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer 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 at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.