Welcome back, today is Friday, October sixteenth, and we begin with Pernod Ricard putting a number on United States softness. Pernod Ricard closed the first quarter of fiscal twenty twenty-seven with United States sales down ten percent, and it pinned the drop on consumer affordability concerns. That comes from Brewbound and BevNET, reporting off the group's earnings call. When the French spirits giant, as BevNET describes it, puts a figure that size on American softness, it stops being a mood and becomes a planning input. The same coverage has the company reiterating that it continues to seek growth in smaller, more affordable formats. That is the lever operators will be asked about next: pack architecture rather than price on the full bottle. On the outlook, Just Drinks reports the chief financial officer saying the group expects the slight improvements it has seen in United States sales to continue, while stressing it is not betting on a bounce back for the time being. Industry reaction leans toward reading the decline as structural rather than cyclical. A recurring point in that read is that listed drinks companies have shed roughly eight hundred and thirty billion dollars in market value since the middle of twenty twenty-one. Others in the trade frame the quarter as geographic rebalancing instead, noting growth in India set against declines in the United States and China. Also today, MGP Ingredients says it will rebrand as Sempreon. The company announced that itself, in a release out of Atchison, Kansas, describing Sempreon as a new corporate identity that brings its three businesses under one name and reflects its evolution over eighty-five years. Per that announcement, the brand launches on November second, alongside a planned move to a new Nasdaq ticker, CASK. For anyone sourcing from MGP, a rename at that point in the chain reads as administrative work rather than strategy, and it is not small: labels, contracts, supplier records and purchase orders all carry the legal entity's name, and a contract distiller and ingredient supplier sitting behind a long list of third-party brands touches a great deal of that paperwork. The release sets the change a little over two weeks out, which is the notice the people who maintain those records have to work with. It does not go further than the new name and the new ticker. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Burgundy's United States shipments fell nine point eight percent by volume and twenty-one point two percent by value in the year through July, per Bourgogne Wine Board figures in Shanken News Daily. Following our earlier report on that Impact Databank forecast, Shanken News Daily now has super-premium spirits outpacing a category projected to inch up one percent, to three hundred and thirteen million cases. In India, ISWAI chief executive Sanjit Padhi tells Mint that value growth hinges on mix, with volume up around four percent a year through twenty thirty and state pricing controls limiting what producers can charge. And finally, Icelandic Glacial will not renew its two-decade master distribution agreement with Anheuser-Busch InBev, Brewbound and BevNET report, as its annual sales pass one hundred million dollars.