New MWs, Trump's mass firings impact US wine, WHO pushes health warning labels for alcohol

Before I get to global news, a few news items from our team.

Next month on 22 March I will be moderating the ‘Rhône Essentials’ seminar at the Rhône Rangers Experience in Paso Robles.

On 23 March Jancis will be in the Netherlands hosting a modern interpretation of the legendary 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting at Harry’s in Maastricht. You can find tickets to both of those events and others on the Where to find us section of our website.

While you’re there, I want to call special attention to an article we published this week. Christian Holthausen’s essay on the importance of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the drinks industry is a powerful argument for why we should be broadening the reach of these initiatives rather than dismantling them.

We continued our re-release of Vintners’ Tales yesterday with an episode featuring the late Edmund Penning-Rowsell, Jancis’s wine-writing mentor and predecessor at the Financial Times. As well as writing for the FT, Penning-Rowsell was chairman of prominent UK wine merchant The Wine Society for more than two decades, wrote a number of books including the much-lauded The Wines of Bordeaux, and wrote wine articles for Marxism Today. He maintained that just because he was a life-long socialist did not mean that he thought the Tories should have all the good wine. We expected this episode to be the last one we would re-release. However, we’ve managed to find three more that our tech team is currently sprucing up – look out for more episodes soon. If you or anyone you know has the episode featuring Howard Ripley or Arabella Woodrow MW, please email me at news@jancisrobinson.com.

On to the news!

Four new Masters of Wine

Today four exceptional human beings were rewarded for years of study and hard work. They are …

Our Amanda Barnes MW, who wrote The South America Wine Guide and covers South America for our site. If you don’t have her book, you should change that!

Jit Hang Jackie Ang MW, a pharmaceutical scientist who is the Director of Cherwell Wine and Spirits and heads the High Throughput Screening group at the Experimental Drug Development Centre in Singapore. 

Sarah Benson MW, who is the wine buyer for the Co-op in the UK.

Kathleen Van den Berghe MW, a Belgian who makes wine in France’s Loire at her two estates, Château de Minière in Bourgueil and Château de Suronde in Quarts de Chaume.

I will be raising a glass to all of these extraordinary people tonight and I hope you’ll join me!

Trump slashes federal jobs affecting wine sector

On 13 and 14 February Donald Trump’s administration carried out mass firings of federal employees. Both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) were affected.

The FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of all the things we eat and drink, determining which ingredients are prohibited from use in food and beverage products. After 89 staffers were cut, the head of the FDA’s food division, Jim Jones, resigned on 18 February saying that it would be ‘fruitless for him to continue’, explaining that the people fired had been employed to do in-depth research on chemical safety to protect the US’s food supply.

The USDA is responsible for many of the grants and much of the research related to grape-growing in this country, as well as guarding against the introduction of invasive species. Last week six scientists who were working on millions of dollars’ worth of wine- and grape-related research were eliminated overnight. These employees were researching smoke-impact and mitigation – which cost the US wine industry an estimated $3.7 billion as a result of the 2020 wildfires – as well as grape-breeding, grapevine viral diseases, mealybugs and spotted lanternflies and precision viticulture. The work that was being done by these six employees had the potential to alleviate billions of dollars’ worth of future damages. The US wine industry is an even more precarious place without them at work.

The WHO pushes for alcohol warning labels

On 14 February the WHO issued a statement saying, ‘Prominent health warning labels on alcoholic beverages are essential for raising awareness that consuming alcohol can lead to cancer.’

The WHO is suggesting that countries require prominent health warning labels on alcoholic beverages, that these labels contain cancer warnings, and that the labels are required to be on-pack rather than as a QR code, as they claim that ‘a pilot study showed that only 0.26% of shoppers scanned QR codes for health information.’

News site Just Drinks contacted industry trade body SpiritsEurope for comment. The director general, Ulrich Adam, responded, ‘Numerous peer-reviewed publications have shown health warning labels (HWLs) to be rather ineffective in inducing behaviour change, particularly among high-risk drinkers. Given this comparatively weak foundation, imposing HWLs is ultimately a political decision, rather than one based on robust data.’

The ‘ineffective – particularly among high-risk drinkers’ is the part that bothers me. Pushes for alcohol labelling, pushes to broadcast the ‘no safe level’ message … these messages will ultimately sway the behaviour of people who are already concerned with their health and are more likely to be moderate drinkers. Which means that the WHO isn’t really tackling the problem of overconsumption; they’re just stigmatising an industry that provides millions of jobs and often serves as a positive impetus for community gatherings.

Berkshire Hathaway invests in Constellation Brands

On 17 February multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway revealed in its 2024 fourth-quarter portfolio update that it had bought over 5.62 million shares in Constellation Brands for $1.24 billion. Constellation owns a plethora of wine brands including Meomi, The Prisoner, Robert Mondavi, Kim Crawford, Ruffino, Lingua Franca and Sea Smoke. I don’t have much insight into investing, but this seems like a fairly risky move. Constellation’s stock price has fallen by 26% since the beginning of 2025.

That’s all for this episode of the Wine News in 5. If you enjoy this newscast and would like to see it continue, please subscribe to JancisRobinson.com. And if you have breaking news in your area, please email news@jancisrobinson.com.

This is a transcript of our weekly five-minute news broadcast, which you can watch below. You can also listen to it on The Wine News in 5 Podcast. If you enjoy this content and would like to see more like it, please subscribe to our site and our weekly newsletter.

 

 

 

 

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