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. Chapters (00:00:05) - Drinks Insider: China and the Future(00:02:04) - Ian Fleming on China's wine market(00:05:47) - Nimbility Wine and Spirits(00:06:57) - China's wine style trends(00:13:13) - Australian Wine: The Market's Changed(00:14:19) - China's wine sales slump(00:16:58) - China Wine Market: Changes(00:19:37) - The epicenter of Chinese wine in Shanghai(00:21:10) - Should Chinese Wine Be More Complex?(00:24:39) - China's GLP1 drugs off patent(00:25:26) - Japan's second biggest market is South Korea(00:30:16) - Women Drink More Wine in China(00:31:37) - What are people drinking in South Korea?(00:33:15) - Japan(00:35:04) - Iran war and its impact on trade(00:36:12) - India and the future(00:39:43) - China(00:40:56) - What Should I Not Spend Money On?(00:42:20) - Japan's wine exports are doing poorly(00:43:34) - Exploring the China white wine market(00:45:30) - China Wine Trade: Excitement among consumers(00:47:35) - Drinks Insider: The Business of Drinking

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.