Areni Live Sessions, Ep1: Wine, Health and Changing Regulations

What if you had access to the world's leading minds of the fine wine world and beyond? What if you could pick their brains during three days of intensive workshops? What scenarios would they draft for tomorrow? What solution would they come up with to answer today's biggest challenges? Well welcome to the Yerini live sessions. I am your host, Paulin Dicare, Executive Director of A Rini Global and in this series, we share some of the most impactful conversations we had during A Rini Live, our biannual event bringing together critical thinkers from iconic and forwards-thinking fine wine producers to leading academics and business leaders. Come with us as we envision the future of our industry. For this very first episode of the Yerini Live sessions, we share a crucial conversation central to the survival of our industry. The changing regulatory environment around our goal and health, this conversation was recorded on July 2, 2025. The situation is complex and a lot of important conversations are happening within the realm of public affairs and global policy, an area that most of the wine world doesn't interact much with. However, this conversation is so important for the future of our industry and key global policy events are happening at the end of September 2025 and might heavily impact our social license to operate. So to help us understand what is happening and what is at stake, we ask three key questions to three key personalities. First question, in which social context are these changes of public health policy happening? Second, how about can the situation become for the alcohol and the wine industry? And finally, is moderation still a valid concept? Tackling the first question is Felicity Carter. Felicity is the editorial director at Arrini Global, but here she speaks on her capacities as the founder of Drinks Insider, a podcast and newsletter focusing on the intersection of drinks and commerce, with an ongoing series of investigations on the topic of wine and health. So, you will all have noticed in the last couple of years that there's a drumbeat of negative news about alcohol and health. And the poster child for this is typically a glass of red wine, which is splashed across articles. Australia just started running at anti-cancer campaign three weeks ago and it uses a glass of red wine as a way of much to the horror of the South Australian wine industry to talk about any amount of alcohol is dangerous for your health and is likely to give you cancer. So, the question is, where is all of this coming from? And interestingly, it is not coming from the public health lobby. That's not where it started. It started in 2013 when a woman called Emily Robinson joined what is now the charity alcohol change in the UK. She had done a marathon and had given up alcohol for a month and noticed that her time has improved, her sleep improved and she went to social media to discuss it. When she got a job with alcohol change, they decided to launch something that's now known as dry January. And when they started, they had 4,000 people involved but it quickly picked up media. And three years later, they had four million people internationally and that changed the conversation about alcohol. The next thing that happened a couple of years later is we got the smartwatch and people began to self monitor. They began to notice that their sleep was better without alcohol. They started getting, if you're me and everyone else, you get radical about how many steps you're taking. And then the next big bomb that went off was 2018, a UK journalist called Ruby Warrington, published a book called Sober Curious about the benefits of giving up alcohol. What she did that was different with this book was she connected it to wellness culture, sort of the goop culture. So instead of it being a critical sort of alcoholics anonymous, you've got to give up. She reframed it as sort of part of a lifestyle you might want to rethink alcohol. And because she did that, it took off on Instagram. And Instagram became a place where people were talking about Sober Curious and where they noticed they could start to make money as Sober Curious coaches. And so now the algorithm is if you put words like wine or brandy or spirits into Instagram, it will bring up Sober Curious posts. So the algorithm is driving some of this. And then what we got was COVID. Now COVID was really important for two reasons. One is that it fundamentally changed the relationship that citizens have with governments. Governments acted in a way that we haven't seen outside of wartime and they did it in the name of health. And so as a result of that, governments have become a lot more paternalistic and citizens have become much more happy to have paternalistic governments. It also made people think a lot about mortality and think about health. And so health stories began to spread in the media and the legacy media is typically read by people over 50. And so a lot of articles about longevity and wellness and how to protect your brain as you age began to go viral as well. Now this all happens before in a different format. This is what happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution that brought a lot of people in together and the rise of distilled spirits. There were lots of problems with alcohol and lots of self-help groups in the 19th century. And one of the consequences of that, as I spoke to a historian of prohibition called Dan Millick, is he said that prohibition started as a bottom-up movement of people trying to improve their health. But what happened was two groups, temperance campaigners and evangelists moved in and they made it part of public policy and then we got prohibition, which was not just the United States phenomenon. Prohibition happened in a number of countries throughout the world. And that is actually what's happening today. You're seeing a bottom-up movement of people rethinking their relationship with alcohol to which public health people have moved in to take advantage of. Now what's really interesting is that the public health people who were taking advantage of this are exactly the same people as we're working more than a hundred years ago. The temperance groups through the 20th century discovered that they were irrelevant after prohibition because prohibition had really damaged any idea of alcohol policy. It had such terrible consequences. So what they did from the 1980s was they began to reinvent themselves as public health experts. So in London you got a group called the UK Temperance Alliance, which was a Methodist group. They are now reinvented themselves as the Institute of Alcohol Studies and they advised the British government on policies, many of which it's absolutely stupid, like minimum unit pricing that don't work. In the European Union you've got a group called Eurocare, which is an umbrella group. It's a lobby group in Brussels, it's been quite effective. It's actually a conglomeration of European temperance groups that are reinvented themselves. And the biggest one is in Sweden. It was founded in 1851 as the Order of Good Templars. It reinvented itself in 2020 as a group called MoVendi and they are now in partnership with the WHO. And not only that, they're writing policy documents for the WHO. So all of this is coming as alcohol harms are actually falling in the first world. But there's one thing, there's one form of alcohol harm which didn't fall, which was during COVID, during lockdown, people could buy alcohol and have it delivered. Now normally if you've got a problem with alcohol, there are social strictures in place to stop you from drinking too much. You have to go to work, you have to show up, if you've got a bar, people will stop serving if you drink too much. But people who had an alcohol problem during COVID lost all of those guardrails and they could order alcohol to the door. And as a consequence of that, in the last five years across Western Europe and the United States, we've seen an enormous spike in alcohol-related deaths. Now, these are not deaths that just suddenly happened to get that sick you have to start drinking decades earlier. But the public health lobby is using this spike in alcohol deaths as a reason to try and rush through anti-alcohol policy. So that's sort of it from me. The word that they found to use it is the word cancer. The scientific evidence as you'll hear from now around cancer is actually not as stark as it's being portrayed, but it's the most frightening word. And so the movement has come away from talking about liver disease and so on, which are the very serious consequences of alcohol to the word cancer. And Holland, the government has started running anti-cancer campaigns at cancer and alcohol and they're featuring wine in Australia because wine is considered the beverage of moderation. If you want people to stop drinking alcohol, you attack wine first. And on that note, I'll leave it to Julian. To answer our second question, how bad can the situation become for the alcohol and wine industry? We welcome Julian Brathwaite, a British diplomat, near other head of the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking and not for profit organisation dedicated to reducing harm from drinking and promoting understanding of responsible drinking, supported by the leading global beer, wine and spirits producers. So Pauline, thank you and Felicity Brilliant, introduction to this discussion where it happened. My name is Julian Braceway and I've been. Zein iам y bafiffodio cyfonneth y fwd. Chyfrôli ei rheol, ymrydd hearll yn llag ffordd�� fy law wrong. A Dyddyŭffeb i roe? Cywaf y barod mel i falg�를 i gyfer y cyfle hefna can cór Cats Hermoshos. 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Mae'r gweithio yn gweithio, mae'r gweithio yn gweithio, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna. Mae'r gweithio yn gweithio, yna, yna. Mae'r gweithio yn gweithio, yna, yna, yna. Dwi'n i lot fforddmaa mwybod yn lot biorneig angh日本甌ed ص Bydd w mag4 x4a y Tina-n Dosag met Hon Nguyen frain wrân fol ailde enzyme Low- Indonesi erro. I'ot breud rhyw kommt y ff follows hygin esse'n gandbod ool amestreradius foosti��. Flirdwrnios gyfransol Francaulio yn a o ff isol ool am yn ff isol ool amestreradius foosti. Felly, yn ff isol ool amestreradius foosti. 'm ydychpel fel a fyd ymoth yn Milwín Cent brarannu – fel y naillu amser holl 보시au writh o sifr yガ pleidio mewn i sugg mewn i begunnwyr bredd ar amser holl fod yn jagos Ylidd. Yn gweithio yn ymwch i ddod yn fwyfnod. Mae'n gweithio yn fwyfnod. Felly, mae'n gweithio yn fwyfnod. a fŵ馬r天 o f geweseneg могloimhau baseKe? the benefits as the potential harms. And then there's something called Mendelian randomization that if you want to hear about it, I'll tell you about it later. But it's this new technology that looks at genetics that most cardiologists think should not be used to look at alcohol harms. Am I getting close to it? One minute. OK. So WHO, I don't think that this no-safe limit should be used. I think the statement is, we are the moment of equipoys where harms and benefits make equal. So I think it is safe unless you only care about cancer. So if you care about overall mortality, I think it is safe to drink a moderation in the over 40. In the under 40, there's this risk of accidents of developing alcohol use disorder, et cetera. So to some raise, I'm skipping my second page. I want to tell you about a website that I started that's called indefenseofwine.com. That is where I put all the letters to the editors that I write. I have gotten one published in the Washington Post. I have been quoted in the New York Times. I have written and gotten a response from the Wall Street Journal writer. I am commenting on every article that comes out. So this is what I ask you to do. You need to get involved. So look at my website. I have a lot of articles there that are not written by me. I'm not a researcher. So I basically post articles. I post positive and negative. So I have all the breast cancer data if you want to read it. And I also point my responses to newspaper articles. You need to read about it. You need to learn about it so that you have your own position. And then most importantly, when friends ask you, so what should I do? Should I continue to drink? Don't tell them, hey, Laura, get in. I says, you're OK to drink. You should say, go talk to your doctor. Because if you have fatty liver disease because I don't know, you've eaten really bad food for many years. Your doctor knows that. They will say maybe to drink less than the one to two glasses. So the message I will give you here is get involved. Write answers to articles. Read on your stuff and send all your friends and yourself to talk to your doctor and have an honest conversation about what it is safe to drink for you and your particular body. Just a question regarding the timing of the UN vote and the change of this and how governments can get involved in this. I'm just thinking of whether we can lobby our own government from a timing point of view. So thank you. I mean, we're-- It's happening now. And we've-- Iod is at the heart of coordinating a group of organizations, trade associations around the world who are engaged in doing exactly that. So we've been seeking to ensure that-- seeking to support the existing strategy, the whole of the society approach that includes the industry rather than tries to denormalize it. And this focus on the harmful use. So a lot of what we've been doing is saying, what have we as an industry done since the last political declaration, which asked the industry to play a role in reducing, in tackling underage drinking, and a lot has been done on that by the industry. So we wanted to show-- you asked us to do this last time. This is what we've done. So we've been going around showing the power of involving the private sector in these big global public health problems. But we've been engaging with the European Union. We've been engaging with the United States. We've been engaging with Argentina, with the Caribbean, which has a real balance to strike, because they're one of the great run regions of the world. But they also have problems with non-communal diseases. So their governments really want to strike a balance that actually addresses what really works. And so a lot of what we've been doing as Iod, because we have a sort of science and policy capability, is really identifying the data that shows what's actually happening. And the really good news is that UN data itself shows that this UN strategy is working. So I was telling you about this alcohol attributable mortality indicator, which is one of the indicators of whether or not this strategy is working globally. So global alcohol attributable mortality around the whole world fell by 20% from 2010 to 2019, which is an extraordinary improvement in global public health when it comes to alcohol and health. That data was published by the UN last June. It hasn't been very well publicized, but we're going around publicizing it, because it's really good news. It's work. This strategy is working. If the strategy is working, you don't need to change it. So that's that sort of thing that we're trying to publicize, get into the hands of governments. So they actually understand when people come along saying, we've got a real crisis with alcohol and health, and we need to change the strategy. They can actually look at the UN's own data that shows the targets that the UN has to look at whether or not they're making progress is demonstrating progress. And that's what I'm doing. The key question was on the deadline, because it's September, right? So yes. It's your time to do something. There is. I mean, it's absolutely live at the moment. So just yesterday, the UN co-versilitator who are coordinating this negotiation in New York to ambassadors circulated the first draft revision of the political declaration. And there are still things in it that are not great for us. This idea of commercial determinants of health is in there. So the idea that all of you should be denormalized, excluded, treated like the tobacco industry. That concept, I'm afraid, is still in this resolution. It may not stay there, but it's there the time being. So there is work to be done. This negotiation will continue over the next. Certainly over this month, probably into August, the actual meeting, the high level meeting on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases will take place in New York at the end of September. There'll be lots of fine speeches. The thing that everyone will-- the thing that will last from this process, won't be the speeches, won't be the fact that health ministers and director generals of WHO turned up in New York. It'll be this political declaration. And that's going to be finalized in literally coming weeks. So we're riding the heart of it, whereas joined up and engaged as we can be. And we're working very closely across with many trade associations, including many in your sector, such as Committee for. One of the reasons that the pushbacks are so ferocious at the moment is because all of the alcohol harms have dropped. I monitor all of the alcohol control, conversations, and literature. And they're really frightened of becoming completely irrelevant as alcohol harms dropped. So they're taking that COVID spike and running with it as hard as they possibly can. Two short comments, Lisa Berkman. I am not a wine epidemiologist, but I am a social epidemiologist and study aging and longevity and cardiovascular disease. The two things that I'd like to say that are worthy of discussion is to contextualize the experience that you're having about the absolute temperance kind of thrust. And that kind of pseudoscience, I would say, that has gained so much momentum in Instagram and on social media that really has nothing to do with evidence like the kind that Laura Cartena just talked about is really rampant. And it's not only about alcohol, right? It's about reproductive rights for women. It's hugely in the United States about vaccine efficacy right now. And the idea that this pseudoscience, if you yell loud enough, gains momentum is very, very powerful. And so I would ask really to think about who are the people who are driving that? In epidemiology, we have this idea that there's a web of causation. And one of my colleagues said, well, who is the spider in this? And I think that is a really important question. And the second comment is related in terms of contextualizing is that most behaviors are not personal decisions. Most behaviors are actually socially patterned. And when you look at heavy, heavy alcohol consumption and drug consumption, suicides, these deaths of despair, they're driven not by individual behavioral choices, but by people's isolation, their lack of opportunities, their complete level of despair. And so I think it's very important to think about what are the social determinants of these behaviors that we do think are risky, not the ones. And what are maybe the social factors that promote what we think of as the optimal kind of pattern? And they don't exist as sort of behaviors in and of themselves. Thanks to all three of you for a really brilliant introduction from different angles to this subject. And I think what you said is very significant. But I have a fear that the idea of physiological health research has come to dominate this debate. That's where all the work is being done. And I think there is another part to this debate, which is psychological health, maybe even sociological health, but certainly psychological health. And the psychological benefits of wine, of alcohol perhaps, may come also with this benefits if someone is suicidal, drinking a lot is not going to help. But I think for many of us, the psychological impact is going to outweigh the physiological disbenefit potentially. It may be something we talk about more over the next-- I don't know, I just make that comment, I don't know if anyone wants to talk about that. Yeah, I think it's, well the point, I guess it's by and transforms Steve comments in a question, is that normally the definition of health is not the absence of disease, it's something more global, but overall in public policy sphere, it seems like it's been reduced to the absence of disease. Is that correct? And is there a way we can change that and have a larger definition of health? So in these sort of UN strategies, it is very sort of physiological and epidemiological if you like, and this wider context does get lost. I mean, we've been thinking about how to try and bring that into the discussion in a way that can't immediately be dismissed as, well, an organisation that is funded by the B.O.I. and the spirit's organisations would say that wouldn't they? But there is something around this point about the social determinants of health, I think, maybe that's the way in and those points about the impacts of isolation on health and the degree to which alcohol actually does play a role both psychologically and sociologically in addressing some of those things in moderation, as part of the Mediterranean Dart with families, over dinners, it's part of traditions that connect people, the reduced isolation, that are psychologically beneficial, that finding where telling that story in a way that can't immediately be dismissed is one of the things that we're looking at in my science and policy team and looking at price-wise so to that. Yeah, because I read so much alcohol control, it's sure, I've got them all in my head now, so I know what they would say about this. Unfortunately, in most countries, there are laws against making claims about alcohol and sociability or desirability or whatever, so one of the reasons that it's been very narrowly framed in terms of health is because that's a legal area where the alcohol industry can actually speak. PMN saw white sites, I've just got an observation in a question, the first observation is the term no safe level, I think is extraordinary because there was no safe level for us getting here, there's no safe level for us going into a car and driving and actually if governments want to introduce safe levels, we may as well just all go and live in a box. So from a sort of philosophical perspective, I have obviously massive issue with that, but let's put that aside, what's the opportunity for the wine industry? So I look at the UK government who have just introduced the most complicated duty taxation system, I can understand the principles behind it, but what they have done is they've ignored differences in alcohol, what is the difference between how a wine is made or how wine is consumed versus spirits or beer? So my question is, what should the wine industry be doing to distinguish itself within alcohol? Because I think we have lots of positive things that we can do and we need to shout much louder as a wine industry, we're not just alcohol. So from this is probably a Julian thing, from a policy point of view, the alcohols can't move away from one another, one of the reasons is that the spirits industry I've discovered has enormous resources that it's putting into science and lobbying that the wine industry can't match. I actually think people need to make a lot more noise, I went to Brussels last year to talk to politicians about this and while I was there I spoke to some representatives from other industries that are under attack, particularly the farming lobby in the EU. And they take to the streets, they take trackers and they dump stuff outside parliament and they will not tolerate some of the policies which members of the laptop class impose on them. And I started to think that maybe the wine industry in Britain should have actually got out and demonstrated against those ridiculous policies because they aren't ridiculous. Anyway, that's my two cents. Julian. Just something very briefly, I mean the WHO, from the WHO alcohol is alcohol. So there is no distinction between wine, spirits or beer, you're all alcohol and that won't change, you're not going to get a special dispensation in this system. But you are different in so many ways and you're all about agriculture, I mean look at this, I think you are able to mobilize the agricultural side of governments if you like or of societies and tell that story about the importance of this industry which is very powerful politically in so many countries. And that voice has got lost as the beddly public health ministers have taken over policy on alcohol. So go out and mobilize your agricultural ministries and constituencies. You know, for sure the way I grew up wine is what I drink in moderation. But what I like to tell people as a physician is if you like to drink, you should drink whatever you can drink in moderation. So if you like to have your little whiskey when you go to bed at night and that's what you grew up with and that's how you stay moderate, that's what you should do. So I think it's, it could be a little condescending for us wine people to say that the beer people hate, your beer is worsened by wine. So I think, I think whatever you can bring in moderation and it's cultural for you that brings you joy, that brings this whole conviviality and hanging out with your friends thing, that in moderation, very important. Thank you for listening to Rene Live Sessions, a podcast series produced by Rene Global, a research organization dedicated to the future of fine wine. Rene Global helps wineries, distributors and retailers to understand how the world is changing and how they create risks to be managed and opportunities to be seized. What risks, what opportunities, well be sure to visit our website, Rene.Global. Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media so you don't miss any of our reports, events and analysis. Until next time, cheers! [Music]