The Biggest Drinks Industry Feuds Happening Right Now (2026)

Last reviewed July 2026 · Every allegation here is contested and unproven unless stated. Company responses included where issued.

The drinks industry would love you to believe it is a genteel world of cellar masters and slow-swirled glasses. It is, at the moment, doing its very best impression of a Wetherspoons at closing time.

Underneath the candlelight, several of the biggest names in booze are locked in fights ranging from the deadly serious to the deeply petty. There are federal lawsuits alleging that famous tequila isn’t really tequila. There’s a Mexican regulator that once sent police to raid a tequila blogger’s house. There’s a spirits giant whose new boss has been nicknamed after a horror film. There’s a trade war using champagne as a hostage. And there’s a Scottish brewery that sold its fans a revolution and is now quietly trying to sell itself.

Pour something. Preferably something not currently named in a class action. Here are the biggest feuds in drinks right now.

Tequila had a spectacular decade. It is now having the hangover, and the hangover has lawyers. There are actually two wars going on at once here, and they feed each other.

Front One · The Regulator vs The Nerds

For years, a couple based in Guadalajara called Grover and Scarlet Sanschagrin ran Tequila Matchmaker, an app that did the one thing the industry didn’t want done: it told you which tequilas secretly contain additives. Mexican rules let producers add up to 1% of sweeteners, colouring and glycerin, the stuff that makes a tequila taste suspiciously “smooth”, without disclosing a word of it on the label. The Sanschagrins built a voluntary programme to verify which brands used nothing at all.

The Consejo Regulador del Tequila, the CRT, which regulates the entire category, did not care for this. What followed reads like a telenovela. In March 2024, according to Wine Enthusiast, the couple’s home, which housed their testing equipment, was entered under a search warrant and hundreds of pieces of kit were confiscated, on the accusation the place was being used for illegal distillation. This happened two days after they’d hosted a tasting seminar for journalists in New York. Then in 2025 the CRT filed a lawsuit against the Additive Free Alliance in a Florida federal court, arguing the group is running an unauthorised certification scheme and misleading the public.

Front Two · Is Famous Tequila Even Tequila?

While that simmered, a far bigger grenade rolled in. Agave farmers began alleging that large producers were cutting their “100% agave” tequila with cheap industrial cane alcohol, a practice known as cold mixing, which is illegal in Mexico. Then the lawyers arrived. Law firm Hagens Berman, later joined by Baron & Budd, filed class action lawsuits against Diageo, alleging its two blockbuster tequilas, Casamigos and Don Julio, are not what the label says.

The numbers, if you believe the complaints, are eye-watering. Using carbon-isotope testing, the plaintiffs allege Casamigos Blanco is roughly 33% agave-derived alcohol, and that even the pricey Don Julio 1942 comes in around 33%. As Mezcalistas pointed out, that would mean these “premium” bottles allegedly contain less agave than a cheap mixto. The California case throws in words like racketeering, mail fraud and wire fraud for good measure. Michael Jordan’s Cincoro and Kendall Jenner’s 818 have since been hit with their own versions.

As of May 2026 the fight is still very much live: Diageo has asked the court to pause the cases, and the plaintiffs have replied that it hasn’t “come close” to justifying a stay. Nobody has proven anything. But for a category that sells itself on purity and heritage, the mere accusation is corrosive. I’ve unpicked the whole additives mess in the 100% agave investigation, and the numbers behind the celebrity brands in the Teremana deep dive.

Not every feud needs two companies. Sometimes the most dramatic fight is a giant grappling with its own decline. The owner of Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, Don Julio and roughly 200 other brands has spent 2026 in what one report memorably described as a “funeral home atmosphere” at its London head office.

In January, Diageo installed a new chief executive, Sir Dave Lewis, the former Tesco boss known throughout British business by the cheerful nickname “Drastic Dave”. He earned it, fast. In February, his first results landed like a dropped tray: shares fell nearly 13% in a single day, one of the worst drops in years, and he cut the dividend by a brutal 80% to conserve cash. This from a company whose reliable dividend was practically its personality.

It matters well beyond Diageo, because Diageo is the weather. When the biggest company in the category cuts its dividend, sheds staff and warns of two to three years of shrinking sales, every rival reads it as a forecast. And the tequila lawsuits above are landing on precisely the company least in the mood to absorb another problem.

This one isn’t a feud between two drinks companies. It’s a feud between governments, in which the drinks companies are the ones getting hit. It has been rumbling for a while, and 2026 keeps yanking it in new directions.

The short version: the EU threatened a 50% tariff on American whiskey, and in response President Trump threatened a 200% tariff on all European wine, champagne and spirits. A French export chief warned this would be “a hammer blow”, telling the AP flatly that at 200% duties, “there is no more market”. A $15 bottle of Prosecco could in theory become a $45 one. Bourbon, meanwhile, sat in the crossfire, with “Buy Canadian Instead” tags appearing on cleared American-whiskey shelves in Vancouver.

LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, whose empire includes Moët & Chandon and Hennessy, was reportedly lobbying both Brussels and Washington personally, which tells you how much money was on the table. Then in February 2026 the US Supreme Court struck down the broad tariffs 6 to 3, in a case where the lead plaintiff was a small New York wine importer, Vos Selections, rather than a giant. “A fantastic day for American justice when a small company like ours… can have their case heard at the U.S. Supreme Court and win,” they posted.

Things have settled, for now, around a 15% EU rate, but nobody in the industry trusts it to hold. The feud here isn’t really about drinks. It’s that champagne, bourbon and Scotch make satisfying, headline-grabbing hostages, and everyone knows it.

If any story captures the mood, it’s this one. BrewDog built an empire by casting itself as the anti-establishment punk of British beer, and by selling shares to ordinary fans through its “Equity Punks” crowdfunding, roughly 200,000 of them, sold the dream of owning a slice of the rebellion.

In February 2026, Sky News reported that BrewDog had hired a bank to sell itself off, reportedly chasing a “quickfire deadline” for offers. This after a fifth straight year in the red, a $40m-plus annual loss, and the closure of its Aberdeen distillery in January. Both founders, James Watt and Martin Dickie, had already left.

It’s the most poignant fight on the list, because the opponent isn’t a rival brewery or a regulator. It’s the gap between what a brand promised its most loyal believers and what the balance sheet was always going to deliver. Selling anti-corporate rebellion is a wonderful business model right up until the corporate reality arrives.

And a footnote in the “how fast a brand drops a person” file: back in late 2024, Conor McGregor was scrubbed from Proper No. Twelve whiskey within days of being found liable in a civil assault case, his face wiped from the brand’s marketing overnight. It’s not a live feud now, but it’s the cleanest recent example of how quickly a drinks company will cut a famous face loose when the reputational maths turns.

Step back from the individual punch-ups and a single shape emerges. This is what a category looks like the morning after a decade-long party.

Through the 2010s, spirits, and tequila especially, boomed. Money flooded in, celebrities piled on, valuations went silly, and everyone assumed the good times were structural rather than cyclical. Now the growth has flattened, drinkers are spending less and in some cases drinking less, and all the tensions that a rising tide papered over are surfacing at once. The additive shortcuts taken during the boom are now lawsuits. The celebrity brands built on vibes are now being asked what’s actually in the bottle. The crowdfunded rebellion is now a spreadsheet. The dividend that always went up is now cut.

When the growth stops, the lawyers, the regulators, the activist investors and the betrayed fans all show up at once to argue over who takes the hit. That’s not a drinks problem. It’s just what the end of a boom looks like, served over ice.

Sources & Reporting

All litigation described is contested and unproven unless a court has ruled. Company denials included where issued. Hagens Berman, Mezcalistas, Yahoo Finance, VinePair, The Spirits Business, Wine Enthusiast, Inc., Morningstar, Food Manufacture, PBS, Wine Enthusiast (tariffs), VinePair (BrewDog), The Drinks Business, Food Dive, CNN.