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Felicity Carter is in demand. It would probably be better for us wine-lovers if she weren’t—but if anyone is fit to report on a wine industry in crisis, it’s this globe-trotting journalist who’s made it her business to cover the business of wine from all angles..
Australia-born Felicity resides in Germany, where she served for many years as the editor-in-chief of Meininger’s Wine Business International. She joined the publication when it had 800 subscribers and, harnessing a team of correspondents, turned it into an indispensable trade magazine read in 38 countries. The publication closed in June 2025, four years after Felicity called time on her 12-year stint there.
These days, Felicity reports on all things drinks on her Substack, Drinks Insider, which has a podcast element. Last year, she won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Best Audio for an episode that aired on its sub-podcast, Wine + Health. The subject of that episode was the alcohol J-curve—the idea that moderate consumption has a positive health impact, while harms rise precipitously as intake increases. Felicity’s robust interview with Professor Tim Stockwell, who has become the central figure in attempts to debunk the J-curve, is highly recommended and can be found here.
Felicity and I discuss this subject at length, as well as the serious harms associated with excessive alcohol consumption and her mission to provide balance to an argument that is increasingly skewed towards “denormalising” drinking and treating alcohol like tobacco. Another fascinating area of Felicity’s reporting has been on the reinvention of historic temperance groups as public health bodies, such as Movendi International. We speak about how an alliance of activists, scientists and NGOs attempts to influence policy.
One strong voice on the other side of the argument is Argentina’s Dr Laura Catena, the physician and fourth-generation vigneron who serves as managing director of Bodega Catena Zapata in Mendoza. Felicity mentions Dr Catena when she reels off her recent speaking duties. We also discuss another source of balance to this argument: Unati (University of Navarra Alumni Trialist Initiative), which seeks to establish whether there is such a thing as healthy drinking via a randomised clinical trial.
Our conversation also delves into marketing, a key subject on the Question of Drinks podcast that Felicity co-hosts with the UK-based founder of Wine Intelligence, Lulie Halstead. Marketing and research also fall within the remit of London-headquartered fine-wine think tank Areni Global. Felicity is the group’s editorial director and alludes to Areni Global co-founder Nicole Rolet. We discuss a recent research project undertaken by Areni executive director Pauline Vicard in collaboration with Berry Bros & Rudd, 67 Pall Mall and LVMH Vins d’Exception.
A couple of other references that need explaining are Edward Slingerland’s book, whose excellent subtitle I couldn’t recall, Drunk—How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilisation, and Felicity’s interview with Kirk French, the Penn State professor who developed the hugely popular Anthropology of Alcohol (aka Booze and Culture) course. We also mention T-shirtgate, a mischievous reference to the controversy surrounding a group of future leaders of the Aussie wine industry—the Coonawarra Vignerons’ Next Crop cohort—who landed in hot water for appearing in a photograph wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan Drink More, Die Younger.
