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I buy, and am sent, a lot of bottles, which means I get to see certain trends developing across the wine market. One that has become increasingly noticeable is the number of older vintages, or previous years’ releases, still sitting on retail shelves. From my perspective, it has caused quite a few bottles not to taste as they should. In these cases, I have chosen not to review them. You could describe these wines as ‘tired’, but the reality is that many mass-consumer wines are made to be drunk when they are released. A year or two later, they may…

I have written previously about the idea of complexity in wine, but it is also important to look at the research in order to understand it more fully. A particularly interesting TEDx presentation, The Art and Science of Wine Tasting by Qian Janice Wang, explores the question of what wine complexity really is or isn’t. Her discussion suggests that chemical complexity does not necessarily correspond to perceived wine complexity. In other words, a wine with a more complicated chemical composition is not automatically experienced as more complex by the person tasting it. The presentation also highlights that complexity can involve…

Italian wine has built one of the most serious anti-counterfeit systems in Europe, but it still has a glaring weakness: the last step, where the consumer is supposed to verify the bottle, is not good enough. The official Trust Your Wine app was launched by IPZS in 2017 as the state-backed way to check DOCG and DOC seals by scanning the datamatrix and querying the official system, and it remains available today in the Google Play and Apple app stores. It promises bottle-level authenticity, provenance and traceability. That promise matters because the underlying problem is real. In March 2026, the…

I’ve recently launched a new website, wineheadlines.com, which offers a broader range of news drawn from across the wine industry. It’s intended for anyone with a professional or personal interest in wine, and caters to a wide readership that includes consumers, PR professionals, retailers, importers, producer organisations and winemakers themselves. This new site emerged as an offshoot of winedrinker.co.uk, the site you’re currently visiting. While researching stories for this site, both for its content and out of personal interest, I regularly sift through a high volume of industry news and press releases from multiple sources. Many are have poor or…

The Sommpour’s WSET Diploma D3 Audible Cheat Sheets, created by Anna Belani-Ellis, form a structured audio learning series following the official WSET Diploma D3 “Wines of the World” syllabus. Released progressively on Substack, the episodes can be streamed or downloaded, allowing students to study flexibly while maintaining continuity with the textbook. They are not summaries or shortcuts but explanatory tools designed to strengthen understanding of the causal links that define wine style, quality, and price, precisely the analytical reasoning required at Diploma level. Each recording stays fully aligned with the syllabus and focuses on using facts rather than memorising them.…

Jean-Noël Kapferer, Emeritus Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris and expert in prestige and luxury management, explores how the concept of luxury applies across different cultures and industries, with particular insight into wine. He defines luxury as something desirable but inaccessible, needlessly expensive, and emotionally powerful. True luxury, he argues, must be “somewhere else”, distinct, exclusive, and difficult to attain. When discussing wine, Kapferer is deliberately provocative, asserting that “there are no luxury wines,” only wines that may form part of a luxurious lifestyle. Even the most expensive bottles remain accessible to the wealthy and therefore cannot reach the same…

The Northwest Wine Report says that Meta has begun telling many wine, beer and spirits-related businesses that their Facebook Pages will no longer be recommended by Facebook’s algorithms, which those businesses say is already reducing reach and, by extension, revenue. The author says the change appears to have hit at least hundreds and possibly far more businesses, with confirmations from wineries, retailers and related organisations across several US West Coast states and at least one report from Denmark, while Instagram does not appear to be affected so far. A major theme is confusion about both the message and the reason.…

Following the work on my Typicity tool, I began exploring whether it could be adapted to handle food and wine pairing in both directions. I have now put together a simple tool that does just that. You simply choose the mode, either wine to food or food to wine and then begin typing to receive tailored suggestions. Try it here

When I go to tastings and scan wine ranges for offers across supermarkets, I am starting to notice the same thing: the lists are slowly shrinking. People might be noticing price increases, but the real story is the gradual narrowing of what’s actually available. It prompts an uncomfortable question: have we gone past peak wine choice? Inside the trade, the mood points in that direction. The industry seems to be focussing on managing contraction rather than chasing expansion. Consolidation dominates the conversation. Large players such as Vinarchy are severely cutting down on their brands. Big distributors are turning away hundreds…

At the end of October 2025, my wife and I took a short cruise aboard the Cunard Queen Anne, visiting ports in Spain and Portugal. I’d intended to take a break from writing about wine, but I couldn’t resist putting together a few reflections and tips based on the experience. Carnival, with the new ship Queen Anne, is targeting younger travellers by modernising the experience without ditching its heritage. Queen Anne shows this shift with contemporary dining concepts, livelier nightlife like the Bright Lights Society, casual venues, lighter design and wellness touches. Reports suggest more guests in their thirties and…

When tasting many wines during large wine tastings, I often find my brain eventually becomes a bit numb trying to pinpoint what different things actually taste like. I’m also aware that I need to broaden my wine vocabulary and include a wider range of descriptive terms. With that in mind, I felt I needed a tool to help me better understand wine typicity and what a wine should taste like. I had a look around but couldn’t find anything that really did what I wanted, so I ended up creating one myself. It gives me a starting point when my…

A noticeable trend in informal hospitality is the slow demise of the wine list. Fewer people are drinking wine when eating out, largely due to affordability issues. The rising costs in hospitality, driven by duty increases, environmental packaging regulations and national insurance, make both customers and proprietors more cautious. For proprietors, there is less incentive to curate and maintain a thoughtful wine list when demand is falling, and this leads to a gradual erosion of what was once a point of pride. A recent experience illustrated this perfectly. In the UK, at an otherwise excellent Italian market and pizzeria, which…

In the August 2025 issue of Decanter, Alder Yarrow and Fiona Beckett have an entertaining debate whether food and wine pairing is meaningful or a waste of time. Yarrow dismisses it as outdated dogma that alienates drinkers by imposing needless rules, arguing that personal taste, mood, environment and even biology make universal pairing principles impossible. He believes people should simply drink what they enjoy without worrying about so-called correctness. Beckett, however, contends that pairing can enhance both food and wine, offering guidance rather than rigid rules, and that it helps less confident wine drinkers feel more engaged and assured. For…

If you haven’t yet discovered Vivino, it’s well worth a look. Vivino is an app and web site that allows users to rate and describe wines on a scale from 1 to 5, and then aggregates these individual reviews to provide an average rating for each wine. I’ve personally found the average ratings on Vivino to be surprisingly accurate and often a helpful guide when selecting a bottle. Curious to see whether this was just my impression, I decided to look into whether research supports my experience. Vivino relies on the concept of the wisdom of the crowd, the idea…

I’ve been to a lot of large wine tastings over the years, and this post is a reflection on their merits rather than a commentary on the individual events themselves. By large, I mean tastings that include at least 100 wines, though some can offer many hundreds and even 1000s. My typical flow of such events involves working through whites, then rosés, followed by reds. Within each category, wines are usually presented in order of increasing body, which often, though not always, aligns with increasing price. In general, I taste each wine just once, though occasionally I’ll revisit a wine…

The wine trade has long held public relations in high regard. With its roots in traditional media and its polished professionalism, PR has been a staple in shaping the industry’s image, securing column inches and spreading the gospel of good taste. Yet in recent years, a new force has emerged, reshaping how influence is both distributed and perceived: the influencer, or is it vinfluencer? Jason Millar’s article, In Defence of Influencers, raises a timely point about how language colours perception. “Influential” is a compliment, yet “influencer” is often said with an eye-roll. This semantic sleight-of-hand reveals deeper discomforts within the…