Ep 34: How the Wine Industry Learned to Bore Its Best Customers - A Question of Drinks | Lyssna här

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.

Chapters

(00:00:04) - A Question of Drinks
(00:00:30) - A Question of Drinks
(00:02:12) - How to make wine more interesting
(00:03:25) - The 42 Minute Winemaker
(00:04:11) - The joy of a wine tasting
(00:06:47) - The Bad Presentation
(00:10:38) - Richard Rantler on
(00:13:16) - The Future of Wine Tasting
(00:16:39) - The Problem with Presentations
(00:17:34) - Wine as a condiment
(00:19:33) - Wine as an Identity
(00:22:35) - The New World of Wine
(00:23:38) - Luxury and the Veblen Effect
(00:26:33) - The Judgment of Paris
(00:27:08) - The Judgment of Paris
(00:32:38) - The Importance of Respect for Wine
(00:35:55) - Do Cheesecake Judges Are Frauds?
(00:38:30) - Don't Trust the Experts in Wine
(00:42:24) - Bringing more joy, happiness into wine
(00:42:53) - The French wine called Chicken Wine
(00:45:04) - Vineland
(00:46:48) - The Presentation Problem
(00:48:39) - Wine Experts and the Question of Treasured Objects
(00:53:26) - The role of humor in wine
(00:55:07) - Advertising effectiveness and the wine
(00:56:33) - Archer Ruse Canned Wine Promo
(00:57:09) - Wine Advertising
(00:59:05) - How to separate trade communication from consumer communication
(01:00:47) - "Build the Wine Round"
(01:01:47) - Are We Now Revealing That You're Not Normal?
(01:03:08) - Wine Presentations: Better Presentations
(01:05:04) - Selling Your Own Wine
(01:06:17) - Questions of Drinks

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