Successful drinks brands tend to create legends which attribute success to thoughtful planning, logical decision making, timely insights and inspirational leadership. This exercise of joining the dots backwards can feel comforting and flattering for those involved in the success, but often disguise the real reasons why a certain product succeeded where others failed. If success has many vocal parents, far less attention is given to the failures – a classic human characteristi

Wine has more stories than pretty much any other consumer category on the planet. Ancient vineyards, heroic winemakers and centuries of tradition. And yet, for all of this narrative richness, most wine brands remain stubbornly invisible to most consumers most of the time. So what is actually going on? The case for storytelling is older than marketing itself. Anthropologists have long argued that humans developed language not merely to share information, but to gossip, build

A brand is how we relate to everything we buy - wine included. Whether it’s actively managed is another question. But with every bottle purchased, those cues shape what we choose, why, when, and how. The word brand comes from the Old Norse brandr — “to burn” — the mark seared onto cattle to show ownership. From the start, it meant more than a symbol: it was a promise of quality, reliability, and consistency. We can define as wine brands as: "The total set of associations,