A Question of Drinks

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.

Chapters

(00:00:04) - A Question of Drinks
(00:00:30) - A Question of Drinks
(00:01:17) - Has Wine Become Irrelevant?
(00:02:23) - A Question of Drinks
(00:02:52) - Mid-range wine
(00:03:36) - Has the Winemaker Market become irrelevant?
(00:04:07) - A Taste of Wine's History
(00:05:51) - The decline in wine sales
(00:07:35) - Wine volumes are down 18%
(00:09:20) - Wine volumes decline 18% in 2019
(00:12:55) - Wine and the traditional place
(00:15:13) - Wine and eating at home
(00:16:22) - Wine and the social occasions
(00:17:14) - Cheap Wine: The Complexity of Wine
(00:19:27) - Wine prices and knowledge of wine
(00:22:34) - Heuristics in wine
(00:24:36) - Is Wine Being Undermined?
(00:27:31) - Wine Question Time: Too Much Wine in the World
(00:32:19) - Wine price stability and the future
(00:34:38) - Gin's'revival'
(00:40:34) - Are Gen Z Drinking More?
(00:43:00) - Wine trends 2020: Younger drinkers
(00:47:43) - Gen Z and the category
(00:48:01) - Will Wine Continue to Decline?
(00:51:16) - The future of wine
(00:54:04) - Wine: Has it Become Stupid?
(00:58:09) - The New Wine of the Future
(01:03:01) - A Question of Drinks

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.

Chapters

(00:00:04) - A Question of Drinks
(00:00:30) - A Question of Drinks, 1961
(00:01:04) - World's wine consumption hits lowest level since 1961
(00:02:05) - Is Wine Becoming Irrelevant?
(00:04:05) - Will Wine Decline From 1961?
(00:09:16) - Why Did Wine Soar?
(00:12:24) - Robert Parker and the prestige of wine
(00:16:46) - Wine and the food culture
(00:20:44) - The Law of the Sigmoid Curve
(00:24:26) - The decline of prestige in wine
(00:26:45) - Wine's 'Peak' Moment
(00:27:40) - The Good Wine of Yellowtail
(00:28:09) - The Chinese wine crisis
(00:31:54) - Wine's demographic peak, and the future
(00:33:04) - Wine Review: The Marketing to Women Trend
(00:36:38) - Inventing Sparkling Wine and Rosé
(00:38:59) - Sparkling Wine
(00:44:46) - Multiple occasions for wine drinking
(00:46:41) - Women and the Aperitivo
(00:47:26) - Wine's relationship with food
(00:51:28) - The Middle Market and Wine
(00:52:29) - The Wine Trade's Wrong Questions
(00:53:21) - Winemaking's Place in Tourism
(00:54:03) - Wine Prospects 2022
(00:59:34) - Charlie and Felicity
(01:00:23) - A Question of Drinks

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.