So is there a better way of looking at the future of celebrity wines than being invited to a seminar with lunch on “The Future of Celebrity Wines”, sponsored by someone with a stake in either the success or demise of celebrity wines, and regurgitating the answer on a podcast?

Well, yes. But how we answer that question is more useful than the answer we come up with. Although saying that, it’s a useful answer.

Especially as the most useful and valuable predictions are those made before the answer is obvious. And right now it’s far from obvious that celebrity wines are over.

This graph - from a couple of months ago - shows Kylie Minogue’s rosé in rude good health with year-on-year sales growth of £200,0001. For what it’s worth, I predict this will continue2. There remains a steady flow of new launches too, both from new and existing slebs. Innovation as well. Sarah Jessica Parker has launched a Sauvignon Blanc with a hint of jalapeňo. To not-entirely-universal-critical-acclaim, but presumably healthy sales.

So why would we think that maybe the celebrity wine tide is turning? There are three reasons. But remember, it’s our way of thinking that matters more than the answer.

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― P.J. O’Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

I’ve been invited to a conference on wine and sustainability. I’m not going to go. Obviously. Oh the earnestness. The virtue. The “we’re on the right side of history” of it all.

But more importantly, I don’t believe it will make any difference. Sustainability conferences are full of good, kind people who preach to the converted. But then so is Methodism, which is predicted to die out by 2040. About the same time as the Northern White Rhinoceros.

To really to change the world-of-wine-sustainability we need skeptics capable of bringing along haters. Which is why I want to put together a sustainability conference called “By Skeptics, for haters”. And my conference programme would look very different.

The Sustainability Paradox

Once everyone has signed in and got their mug of Rainforest Alliance coffee, the first session will tackle the “Sustainability Paradox”: the reality that brands who go hard on sustainability claims have a tendency to underperform commercially. To make matters worse, they even end up making people less likely to behave sustainably.

We know this from a meta-review of 94 studies called “When Sustainability Backfires”. Shoppers just see too many “green” claims on the high street which leads them to switch off. On top of that they see too many cases where companies claim to be “sustainable” but don’t back it up with action. And most damaging of all, for many of us, “sustainable” means “less tasty” or “more expensive”.

Or both.

This is the sort of thing that led a sparkling wine brand to withdraw the “organic” labels on its wine last year. A vivid example of “greenhushing”. They didn’t change how they made it. (It was still organic). They just stopped telling people. And they’re not alone. Companies are discovering there’s a silent majority of skeptical shoppers with a purchasing power that far outweighs the sort of true believers you meet at sustainability conferences. Those companies are also recognising there are millions out there who will tell researchers that they “definitely will” buy sustainable products in surveys, because... well, who wants to be the sort of bastard who tells a researcher that they just wants something cheap and tasty and don’t give a stuff how it came to be that way?

It’s a modern variation of David Ogilvy’s line that “people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say”. But green.

You’re very probably making it worse

After that cheery opener we’ll follow up with a session with the punchy title, “To be honest you’re probably making it worse by banging on about it”.

In an eye-opening session we’ll learn from a behavioural scientist about a thing known as Brehms reactance theory. Which suggests that deep down, people are like deliberately contrary teenagers. Or as Mark Twain put it:

“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”

The more sustainability is presented to us as an obligation and moral imperative... the more people react against it. Extraordinarily, this is true even for people who were open to the idea in the first place. Telling people they’re morally deviant for liking heavy bottles or conventionally farmed vines doesn’t dissuade them from choosing those wines. It actually makes them more likely to reach for 900 gram bottle of “Chateau Roundup”. Even if they were open to sustainable wines before.

Big is beautiful (in the world of sustainability)

And there’s going to be time for one more session before lunch. So the haters & skeptics conference will tackle an unpalatable truth: the big winners in a sustainable wine future will be the big boys.

This effect is true of anything that imposes regulatory costs. Like the imposition of GDPR. Multiple studies found that Europe’s GDPR regulations disproportionately benefited larger companies. That was for the simple reason that bigger companies could cope with all the compliance costs better than smaller companies.

I see a wine example of this every time I walk into the Swedish wine monopoly. Systembolaget is proud of the sustainable credentials of the wines in its permanent range. Its goal is to be the world’s most sustainable wine retailer. But it’s not achieving this goal by persuading small, artisanal producers to switch to lighter-weight bottles or to pay for eco-certifications. Small winemakers can’t afford that sort of thing. So they get moved into the temporary assortment with its smaller sales. While the bigger brands who can afford to switch bottle weight or pay for a certificate take over their listings.

This is not an isolated example. It’s a global phenomenon in multiple industries. This is why we see larger firms actively lobbying in favour of stricter regulations. Not because they’re true believers. But because these regulations act as “moats”; costly impositions the big firms can afford but are barriers to entry for everyone else. Don’t believe me? Just look at the sponsor list the next time you see a wine sustainability conference.

They’re not being kind. They’re building a moat.

Compulsion, self-interest, and honesty

By lunch we should all be pretty clear that the usual ideas about how we can save the planet via the medium of sustainable wine choices are largely bunk. So what would work better?

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First up in Cloudy Bay’s “iconic” Te Koko, oak-aged Sauvignon Blanc.

Newly released in Sweden this week, the price is roughly £38.00/$45.00. Is it worth is? Well, it’s had decent scores with Wine Advocate at 95 and Wine Spectator at 92. While James Suckling comes in at an uncharacteristically modest 91-93.

But what’s this?

Pyramid Valley is about £13.00/$17.00. It’s a serious wine from a serious producer, and Biodynamic for those who celebrate. And it has a similar span of scores. The Real Review says 95, James Halliday 94, James Suckling 94, Wine Advocate 92, and Vinous 92.

Te Koko is almost three times as expensive for a similar span of scores. So what do we do now? Laugh at those saps who’ve been taken in by the “marketing” and spend far too much money on wine when they could be having three times the utils1-per-£/$/sek with a bottle of Pyramid Valley.

All answers are the right answer for someone

Earlier this week I made the point that wine has been consistently reduced to numbers and flavour notes and qpr ratios by the very people who are charged with adding value to wine. This has been bad for wine. Or at least for most wine.

As it happens, people pay a lot more for Te Koko - per point - than they do for Pyramid Valley, and not only because it’s been aged in oak barrels. They pay more because the wine means more.

Over the years the team at Cloudy Bay have spent a lot of time, and money, working out what emotion and feeling they want their wines to have. You don’t have to like the emotions and feeling. You might find them cheesy, obvious, pompous, status-obsessed, passé, mainstream… but it turns out that those feelings and emotions make people feel comfortable paying three times as much for a bottle of wine for one that’s equally… “good”.

But other answers are also equally correct. Wine’s “insiders” love to feel that they’re savvy and informed and immune to corporate branding. If Pyramid Valley suddenly started giving their wines a brand glow-up, they’d lose all the people (like me) who love the idea we’ve a good value friend. And quite probably fail to win over enough hearts of the mainstreamers who are drinking Cloudy Bay.

Wine is never objective

Hugh Johnson was characteristically prescient when he was asked why he didn’t score wines for his guides, and replied “how could I score my friends?”

People’s relationships to wine are far closer to friendships than something that can be scored. The spread of scores has also had a regrettable unintended consequence that we’re seeing unravelling in real time; wine producers became seduced by the idea that their wines had “the same score as that one that costs twice as much. We should charge twice as much for ours too.” Well, as we can see in the mini case study above, you can have a wine that costs three times as much with the same scores, it doesn’t mean people will pay more for it.

“Is it worth the money?” is a daft question. So is “what’s its score?” And they’re both just as daft as the statement “well it’s all just branding”. As puts it, “branding is the feeling people remember when they think about you”.

Cloudy Bay is branded. Pyramid Hill is branded. All good wines have branding - because they give people feelings that they remember when they think about the wine. “Natural wine” has caught on because it’s a powerful brand.

Simplistic thinking and monochrome opinion are a scourge on wine. In a business as complex as wine you’re allowed to believe several contrary things at the same time. All can be true.

I make a prediction that it will sell out immediately. Even though there is no indication of which vineyard it comes from, who made it, how they made it, or what previous success they have had in making wine.

In fact it’s not being sold by a winemaker at all. It’s being sold by an artist.

Mr Bingo.

There will be the tiresome cohorts in wine who will immediately ask “but is it really worth £120? You know you could get a bottle of excellent value Domaine XYZ for just £35…”.

They will say this because they have no idea of what value is and how it’s created. Wine has far too many people like this. It is one of the biggest challenges facing the commercial world of wine.

Mr Bingo is unwittingly showing himself to be a devoted follower of the Austrian School of Economics here1. For an Austrian School economist like Ludwig von Mises, value comes from the human mind. He (and they) explained how people rank goods based not on some objective and disinterested scale of virtue. But on how well those goods satisfy their personal desires and needs.

In essence, value is subjective. And this is important.

Yes, there are many people who will find the name “Waiting for Trump to die” on a bottle of wine to be offensive or at the very least distasteful. But the cardinal sin of marketers is to try to sell to everyone. Because you end up appealing to nobody. Far better to sell to the deeply held and persuasive subjective desires of the few. And there are more than enough people who will like that name to sell this out. Immediately. At £120.

This wine also adds value by being an heir to “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp.

“Fountain” caused a scandal when it was first shown. How could someone claim a urinal was an artwork simply by saying “this is an artwork”.

Well Mr Bingo has done much the same here. What he’s selling is not “a bottle of English sparkling wine” as a work of art. After all, he’s an artist. What he makes is “art” by default. Art is worth more than wine - on the whole. So he gets to charge £120 for it, rather than “the market rate”. Why accept the category you’ve been told you ought to belong to (wine) when you could sell into another category that’s far more valuable (art).

Look… I’m not saying that we can all simply rebrand wines as “artworks” and give them names that large numbers of people find distasteful or even offensive. (Even if some people love them.)

But we can learn that the “value” in a bottle of wine is not purely in the gift of the appellation, or the winemaker’s reputation, or scores, or how you did the price build from ex-cellars cost to final retail. Much greater value comes from understanding what gives something meaning to some people and imbuing your wine with that meaning.

There are also some much smaller lessons here too. Including one you might miss.

Fellow Substacker at tells of how he was drawn to copywriting by the “microcopy” in Viz magazine. In the way they played with the quasi-legal terms and conditions and small print they had to do, but all in the Viz tone of voice.

Look closely and you’ll see that Mr Bingo has done the same here:

Mr Bingo often describes himself as “artist, speaker, twat”. So what has he chosen as the lot number for his wine? “L-C018-TWAT”. Most people won’t notice. But for those who do it’s a masterclass in taking your brand very, very seriously. Essentially by dicking about with it.

I have no connection or interest in this wine. But here’s where you’ll be able to buy it. I simply share this on the basis that I think the whole thing is a masterclass in wine marketing. And that’s sort of the point of this Substack.

In the book “Unreasonable Hospitality”, Will Guidara writes:

My dad says that the best way to learn is to teach, and he taught me to study for tests as if I were going in to deliver a presentation.

Guidara took this lesson with him to Eleven Madison Park (EMP), the world’s #1 restaurant where he and the leadership team “made teaching part of our culture”. Central to this was a weekly meeting called Happy Hour, “dedicated to the wine, beer, and cocktails on our menu, [where] we encouraged the team to step in and give presentations of their own”.

It turned the EMP team from those who learned (or “studied”) to those who taught.

The wine business is filled with people dedicated to studying and learning. This is a problem. It would be better - and the business would learn more - if it had a dedication to teaching.

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Matthew Jukes was cleverer, harder-working, more successful, and handsomer than me. And he had fabulous hair. But none of it mattered when we met. Matthew managed to tell me the rudest anecdote I’ve ever heard (about himself), inad…

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And many people in and outside wine have written about it.

Because we’re writers and we know about the science of reader-attention, these stories usually follow what’s known as the “zoom-out narrative arc”, or the “particular-to-general inductive structure”. You bring the story to life (or death) with a specific, individual story. “My friends have lost everything in a wildfire”. And then broaden it out to the much bigger, and harder-to-grasp general picture. “Climate change is having dramatic impacts on the world of wine.”

So we see how “Wildfires burning outside Bordeaux are underscoring the climate challenges facing France’s largest wine region” (Reuters). And how we have entered “a new age of wildfire in wine country” (Beverley Crandon). As Beverly writes “There’s a particular kind of dread that settles over a wine region when smoke shows up on the horizon. This summer, that dread has become routine across southern Europe.”

Except that that’s not what’s happening.

That “dread” may be true for some individuals. But it has actually become less true for winemakers in general. Not only are wildfires less “routine” across Southern Europe. They’re less routine across Europe and the world more generally.

As it happens, this year has had unusually few wildfires across Europe. 2026 looks like it will bea record-breaking year for wildfires. But the record will be that there were so few. Around the world we have seen the lowest area of land burnt by wildfires at this point in the year since records began in 2012. In Europe the area of land burned is less than half the average for this time of year.1

And this is not a one-off.

Across France, both the area burned by wildfires and the number of wildfires themselves have both decreased dramatically since 2002. As this graph from the Global Wildfire Information System (funded by the European Union, hardly known for being some shadowy, denialist organisation) shows.

In Provence, where we have seen some of the most dramatic images of fires, the data show wildfires becoming a thankfully rare phenomenon over the last quarter of a century.

It’s not just France either. Spain shows the same general trend, with outlier years in 2022, 2019, and 2012.

It turns out wine writers know what Stalin recognised; one wildfire is a tragedy. Several thousand wildfires across a quarter of a century is a statistic.

Now there are nuances. And they matter. Although not in a way that supports the headlines above. And talking about these things gets you in trouble. Which is why I’m putting some of this behind the paywall.

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Or to put it another way, who is more trustworthy? One good friend? Or 19,590 people you’ve never met?

I have never bought anything from Oa…

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My tuppence is that “it depends what wine you’re buying” and “actually, some people probably are getting great deals”.

We must first remember there’s no such thing as “the wine market”. Much as there no such thing as …

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“Use the word ‘you’ more than you use the words ‘I’ or ‘we’”

The “you” versus “I” ratio is something you learn on day one, lesson one, of “how to be a copywriter”. It’s one of those foundational rules. Like “write how you speak”. Or “short, simple words and sentences are better than long complicated ones”.

Why?

Well, because forcing yourself to use the wo…

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As it happens, it described perfectly what it intended to. People who were trapped like lobsters within a container into which they had willingly entered. But now isolated from the rest of the world. To their detriment.

Tett’s book is a phenomenal exploration of the perils of siloed thinking. Gillian Tett trained as an anthropologist before becoming a financial and business journalist. Which brings a distinctive perspective to her book. She shows how it’s not just that organisations suffer from being isolated into functional groups (although they do). But that silos are a way of thinking and hinder innovation and progress.

This applies, inevitably, to wine.

This is not how the wine business is split into sales and buying and marketing and operations teams1. But how people within the wine business think in siloed ways about wine itself. To the detriment of the business.

This sort of siloed thinking is hard-wired into “wine people” from the beginning. And is entirely forgivable. The world out there is complicated. So humans have naturally created all manner of “taxonomies” or categorising systems to help make sense of it. I’m not arguing they or we shouldn’t. But as Gillian Tett demonstrates, we should be a lot more aware of them, and cautious about them.

I say “a lot more” as the wine business has a tendency to pat itself on the back when critiquing the problems with its own taxonomies.

The business is prone to rather virtuously pointing out that has rejected unhelpful taxonomies. Like how we tend not to talk so much about old vs new world wines. Everything from “The Judgement of Paris”, to every recreation of The Judgement of Paris, to any attempt at passing the Master of Wine tasting papers shows that claims for a meaningful and identifiable distinction between wines from the “Old World” and “New World” are largely bogus. Or at the very least so leaky at the seams that they’re not really helpful. So we’ve abandoned it.

Yay. Hooray for us.

Unfortunately, the other way the wine business goes about “silo busting” is to keep the existing silo, but make it more complicated. This has long been one of my objections to “wine by style” restaurant lists and retail merchandising. It seems to assume that the way we consider and think about the (wine) world is not at fault. Merely that we haven’t applied enough nuance to it.

But the challenge then is that you can never have enough nuance for what is an almost infinitely complicated project category.

You make an additional category like adding “orange”. But before anyone thanks you there’s a man in a beanie hat and Japanese selvedge denim saying “hey, what about blouge?”

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough different siloes to put wine categories in. It’s that we’re in a silo that thinks this is how you categorise the world of wine.

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The new Prime Minister is personally (“I’m…”) giving thousands of pubs, clubs and music venues a 20% cut in business rates.

Andy, personally, won’t stand by while those cherished local spaces disappear, replaced by boarded-up windows and “For Sale” signs.

A…

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Butter Sommelier

The Club seeks a passionate person with a deep love for and understanding of butter. This individual will curate our butter assortment and assist in training our staff using our butter trolley.

*An encyclopedic knowledge of toast is essential

This advertisement appeared in Country Life in February this year. It was for The Pembroke Club, …

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The piece had only the odd comment and like suggesting it didn’t “perform well”. I then discovered that - au contraire - wine industry CEO’s had been forwarding it to their teams. In one case marked “compulsory reading”.

curtseys

This is not the first time it AI in the wine business has taken on the appearance of pornography; in that more people are looking at it than are prepared to admit.

Organisers of a wine industry AI seminar this year said it was almost impossible to get people to appear on the panel. The wine companies they invited said either they weren’t looking at AI (implausible) or that they were but didn’t want to discuss it in front of their peers. Like AI was a magazine they’d found under a park hedge in 1986.

Just to recap, you should be looking at it. And you should probably be talking about how you’re looking at it.

In the piece we learned that 40% of people - your potential customers - now use AI to search the internet. With questions such as “a wine to drink with salmon en croute”. Or indeed any other dish, or occasion, geographic location, style, price... etc etc.

The results of a little test suggested searches on AI platforms can and are being dominated by big brands. Brands who’ve clearly been doing something sordid in the privacy of their IT and marketing departments to ensure that they appear as much as possible in the results. But with the result that smaller producers, importers, and retailers are becoming invisible.

What to do?

For various reasons (including one that will involve a quite revolting mental image) the answer is not to “ask AI for the answer”. Indeed, there may be quite legitimate reasons to ignore the whole AI search business. (So long as you do something else.) But here are my five top tips on how best to approach the world of AI search for wine businesses.

And yes, there’s a reason I’ve asked a question. And a reason I said there will be five answers.

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What’s the best wine to serve with Salmon en Croute?

The correct way to answer this question is to consult one of the many excellent books of fabulous writers like or . I just checked Victoria’s “Wine Dine Dictionary”. And she recommends Chardonnay in one of its many forms, or a Chenin Blanc from South Africa or the Loire, “as it combines vibrant citrus…

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This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Roy C Wood. I knew Roy at various times as my university lecturer, then Head of Department, my first boss, a co-author, MPhil supervisor, and ultimately a good friend. He was also the only person to cross my picket line during strike action1. Roy was a hugely influential figure in the sociology of food…

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Professor Easterling is an expert on Ancient Greek tragedy, and noted for her idea of “heroic vagueness”. Greek tragedies are set in a distant, mythic, and therefore “vague” past. As Professor Easterling points out, that distance allows the audience to map their own political and moral concerns onto the hero without getting caught up in the specifics.

This means that Oedipus Rex is filled with great truths about the human condition, even though it is told through the fantastical story of a man who kills his father and has sex with his mum. It is because of that fantastical story that Oedipus Rex has far more power than if the hero spent the play complaining about far more relatable concerns like that new bloke in accounts or worrying whether he’d taxed his Vauxhall Corsa.

In the same way, former Olympians, footballers, and Everest summiteers play this role today at industry conferences. They too have “heroic” tales. Often with powerful and important messages for attendees. But their tales are far removed from the lives of the audience. Meaning we can map our thoughts on how the Olympic long jump or Man Utd’s 1999 treble campaign or conquering The Hilary Step are relevant to supply chain optimisation without getting stuck on inconvenient specifics that might intrude on the moment.

Now there were unquestionably many good reasons for asking the retail entrepreneur, consultant, and television presenter Mary Portas to speak at the recent WSTA Conference. But unfortunately she does not pass the “heroic vagueness” test.

Asking Mary Portas for her views on the wine business is a bit like asking Oz Clarke to comment on the Dior Spring/Summer collection. Mary and Oz are both giants in their fields. And they’ve been celebrated for their work both on and off screen not to mention both bemedalled with an OBE for their contribution. And I’m not doubting they can both bring a useful perspective to a topic outside their immediate area of expertise. But do I worry there’s a real and present danger that they’re close enough in these cases to end up tripping up over the details.

Mary’s most obvious stumble was her suggestion that the drinks business lean into the idea of “blue zones”. These are those bucolic - and it turns out mythical - parts of the world that have found themselves disproportionately blessed with centenarian citizens, apparently thanks to good food, relaxed living, and regular wine consumption. However, as those of us long immersed in alcohol’s public health debate know, they are also places marked by the late introduction of birth certificates and high rates of pensions fraud. The “Blue Zone” claim that booze keeps old people alive is an exercise in statistics like saying BBC One’s TV show “Cash In The Attic” kills them off. On the basis that 3.00pm on weekdays was when most of Harold Shipman’s patients died.

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Riedel (the company) have been developing wine glasses to maximise the pleasure you get from each wine style with the right glass. Some are quite obscure. There are even “Bonarda” and “Bobal” glasses. You are not obliged to buy them all.

Maximilian is also a brilliant speaker hosting scores of “Riedel Wine Glass Experiences” that sell out around the world. And I was lucky enough to interview him on The Welcome Wagon podcast - you can enjoy it here:

But I soon discovered you can’t interview Maximilian Riedel (or talk about Riedel glasses) without then being subjected to a dose of “sealioning”1. This term relates to a cartoon that captures a particular type of online commentator.

Wine is oversupplied with these people. And I’d suggest they are a far greater challenge to wine’s future than the odd red-trousered oenophilist with halitosis at a trade tasting. The usual bête noir of the wine commentariat.

These commentators are also known variously as “well ackcherley” reply guys, “debate me” bros, and STEMlords. This is nothing to do with insisting that you hold your wine glass by the stem. (That’s me and the red-trousered oenophilists #Stemwatch.)

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So here’s a simple question. Who is “the Champagne consumer?” The wine business will tell you - with data-based evidence - that it’s overwhelmingly men and women aged between forty and seventy, and especially those aged between forty five and fifty five. Ergo, there is a crisis facing the Champagne business as “Gen Z” (or whatever made-up age group cohort you want to pick) is not drinking Champagne.

Let’s just rewind a moment there. “…is not drinking Champagne”. Here’s the problem. As it happens we don’t usually measure who is “drinking” Champagne. We don’t measure very much about who is drinking a lot of categories. What we measure, and what we have data on, is who is buying the stuff. And the wine business - especially the 80% or so of it that sells to big, multiple, supermarkets - builds its business plans almost entirely on what the data say about who is buying stuff.

Now… that’s important. In the end you have to sell to the people who are paying out the cash. But if that’s ALL you do, you’re missing out on some important context and nuance.

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I hosted a tasting of English wine this week. At the end I pointed out that one of the UK’s leading wine critics (in his time, the 1920-30’s) had loathed the very idea of sparkling wine. Indeed he considered it wasteful and that it degraded the whole idea of wine:

Our sp…

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