Why good drinks stop selling.
Share of occasion is the portion of a consumption moment a brand actually wins, measured against every drink that could credibly fill that moment, not only its own category.
A rosé doesn't lose the aperitivo to another rosé. It loses it to a spritz, a NoLo bitter, a craft soda, or nothing at all.
I use share of occasion as the first read on every brand I work on, because it is the only measure that puts a brand next to what it is really losing to.
Category explains the market. Occasion explains the choice.
Category share answers “how are we doing against wines like ours?” That question gets more comfortable, and less useful, every year. The competitive set that matters is defined by the moment, and the moment is crowded with drinks that category reports don't put on the same page.
RTDs are the only global drinks category in growth (IWSR, roughly +1.3%). Wine-based RTDs grew from 12M to about 15M nine-liter cases in the US in 2025. No/low keeps premiumizing: Moët Hennessy took a stake in French Bloom because moderation is now judged on its own merits.
Meanwhile the US wine market bifurcates: top-quartile wineries grew sales 8% while the bottom quartile declined 10.2% (SVB, 2026). The winners aren't waiting out a cycle. They're repositioning around how people actually choose.
My reading of that spread is not that the bottom quartile made worse wine. It is that it kept measuring itself against the wrong set, and category reporting let it.
A share of occasion read, in six questions.
None of these need a research budget. They need honesty about where the brand actually shows up.
Not the moments in the brand deck. The real ones.
List drinks, not categories. Include “nothing”.
Format, temperature, ritual, price band, permission.
Credibility beats ambition here.
Product, pack, language, channel, in that order of honesty.
Every occasion you keep pretending to win is budget taken from one you could.
Packaging stops being taste and becomes information for a specific shelf and second. Pricing stops being aspiration and becomes what the moment permits.
And the growth conversation changes from “more of the same buyers” to “which adjacent moment is ours to take”.
The Share of Occasion Audit turns this into the first three moves.
If I could only ask a brand one of the six, it would be the last one: what should it stop doing. It is the question that frees the budget for the moment you could actually win.
Tell me what exists, what feels unresolved and what the business needs next. Three lines are enough.