I’ve always maintained that the cards are stacked against craft spirits brands wanting to build a meaningful travel retail presence.

Here is, as usual, a feast of arresting facts and figures in Silicon Valley Bank’s annual study of the US wine market.

The wine trade can be divided into two fundamentally opposed camps. on one side, you have the romantic idealists who believe that wine is – or can be – something special, bordering on mystical: an elixir like no other, comparable to the greatest works of art.

Don’t know about you, but I can’t help feeling that the year has not started well.

At this time of year my inbox invariably gets flooded with press releases from wine and spirit producers trumpeting their latest Chinese new year special-edition gift boxes and travel retail exclusives.

There is a new man at the helm of Diageo Global Travel, the largest drinks supplier to the duty free industry.

This is the time of year to resolve to do something about our bad habits.

One of the main attractions of social media is that it allows individuals and small businesses a platform from which they can shout loudly, without the need for the big-buck budgets that the global companies can call on.

Recently someone described me as a ‘lefty communist’, which is a bit weird really. What, as opposed to a ‘righty communist’?

Now that my christmas decorations have been packed away for another year, it’s time to dust off my crystal ball and try to predict what 2019 has in store for the travel retail liquor business.

What does the sommelier stand for today?

If you could consign something to history, what would it be?

When people make predictions about the next big grape variety, what they’re usually trying to anticipate is the next big switch in consumer taste.

I am writing this on my birthday, and being an (increasingly) old heavy rock fan, I’ve got british rock station planet rock on at full volume.

The cult 1980s British film withnail & I has many quotable lines.

Over the past 12 months I have had the pleasure of spending a considerable amount of time in three of my favourite cities – Glasgow, Dublin, and Louisville.

In the middle of a europe-wide heatwave Geneva airport is not the place to kill a couple of hours before catching a flight home.

Who would have thought it? After decades of dabbling on the margins of the fashionable bar trade, rum is enjoying its most successful spell in the limelight since the early ’90s, when spiced rums swept all before them.

Here we go again. when japanese specialist retailer dekanta released a special bottle of Japanese whisky to mark its third birthday in June, the twittersphere predictably rose up in anger and indignation.

Few days before writing this article, i came across an old piece by Robert Parker, written in 2004, in which he made 12 bold assertions about how wine would look by 2015.

About 15 years ago, while I was the editor of Whisky Magazine, we teamed up with cutting-edge bartender Nick sSrangeway to hold a whisky cocktail competition, encouraging the use of Scottish single malt whisky.

Dubai airport-based retailer Le Clos’ partnership with the macallan has to be one of the most successful operator-supplier relationships in the history of duty free liquor.

How do you market a region? it’s hard enough getting a message right if you’re a one-man band or family firm processing a single or handful of opinions.

A while ago i was walking through Glasgow Airport when I saw a bottle of single malt on offer.

Protectionism. It's a word that has been beyond the pale in the mainstream discussion of politics and economics of the past 30 years.

Twenty five years ago, when I was the features editor at The Publican newspaper, I went with an actor friend to see how pub licensees responded to complaints from customers.

It’s one of the worst PR disasters to have hit the duty free industry in the almost two decades i’ve been covering the business.

Voting in this magazine’s redoubtable annual awards for the world’s most admired wine brands has forced me, as it does every year, to think about the subject of wine brands properly for a change.

If you want proof that alpine whisky is set for its place in the sun, then you need look no further than the 2018 alpine whisky competition held in February.

What is the most important component of a wine brand? What makes it what it is, or, put another way, what can it not do without?

There is a refreshing sense of optimism surrounding the travel retail business which I haven’t seen for quite a few years.

And so it came to pass. After years of legal wrangling led by the Scotch Whisky Association and the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins, among others, the UK Supreme Court has had its final say, allowing the Scottish government to go ahead with its policy of setting a minimum price for alcohol.

London Gatwick may not be the most exotic travel retail location for a brit such as myself.

One of the biggest bugbears for any liquor brand wanting to build a presence in duty free is the high cost of entry.

Sensitivity to weather and climate is the very core of wine’s appeal.

Last week, Distell announced that its Bain's Cape Mountain single grain whisky (40% abv), has gone global. So now we have a whisky form South Africa to join the slew of whisky alternatives to good old scotch.

In Cannes last month as I dashed around from stand to stand and from interview to interview amid a whirl of product launches and cocktail parties, I heard one question asked over and over again.

I once had a colleague who said he chose to fly long-haul flights with United Airlines Because at the time –

The thorny issue of airport drinking has once again hit the UK headlines at a particularly bad time for travel retail.

Most studies suggest they're considerably better for the environment. They’re more convenient, too, if you want to keep your wine fresh for more than a couple of days.

"I’ll have a couple of passion fruit Martinis, love. Actually, make that four."

Have you heard the one about George Clooney’s four-year-old tequila brand selling to Diageo to the tune of $1bn?

Couple of months back Sam Smith’s Brewery in Yorkshire, England, issued an instruction to its 200 or so pub managers to refuse to serve customers who swore in their pubs.

When I first arrived here I was the whisky man who was making gin as a sideline,” says Daniel Szor, founder and owner of the Cotswolds Distillery, which lies close to Banbury in the no-man’s land between the west, the south and the middle of England.

For the best part of two decades the western duty free business has looked east, pandering to the whims of the emerging mainland Chinese traveller.

Tourism is an increasingly important part of the wine business.

A year ago I tentatively suggested the upcoming UK referendum on EU membership might have enormous ramifications for the European travel retail business.

I’ve always been amused by old pubs, bars and restaurants which have the words ‘fine ale, wine and spirits’ or similar painted on their wall or written across their window.

If you want to know where the spirits industry is headed, you could do worse than look at beer.