The podcast that's interested in everything drinks. If you can drink it, sell it, and make money from it, we'll talk about it, though we're (mostly) fascinated by beverage alcohol. It's all about the intersection of drinks and commerce.
Ep 46: Ian Ford on the Single Biggest Mistake Wine Brands Make When They Enter Asia
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.
22 Apr 2026
Ep 45: Prof. Simone Loose on How the Golden Age of Wine Came to an End
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.
1 Apr 2026
Ep 44: Simon Farr on Fine Wine, Bad Markets, and Where He Sees the Opportunities
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.
Who has been a guest on Drinks Insider
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Allison Luvera
Michael Moriarty
Nash Hale
Daniel Rodriguez
Daniel Rowntree
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Spotify
4.6 / 5
17 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 53 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
85
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
51
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