Brinker Said Maggiano's Reversed a Ten-Year Alcohol Decline. The Texas Receipts Say the Cocktails Worked and the Wine Program Didn't.

How Brinker told the thesis

On Tuesday morning, Brinker International reported fiscal Q3 2026 earnings. Chili's posted comparable sales of +4.0%, its 20th consecutive quarter of positive comps, and the Big Crispy chicken sandwich launched in mid-April was selling 161% above the platform it replaced. Maggiano's Little Italy, the company's other brand, posted comparable sales of -4.6% on traffic of -10.4%. Brinker's CFO Mika Ware told the call Brinker is "not immune from the industry's contracting alcohol mix." The stock closed up 14.6% the same day.

That night, CEO Kevin Hochman went on Mad Money and told Jim Cramer that Brinker is "firing on all cylinders." He has spent the past 18 months crediting the Mixologist Collection cocktail relaunch and the Master Sommelier wine curation with reversing what he described in October 2024 as a 10-year decline in alcohol sales at Maggiano's. The Q3 FY26 prepared remarks repeated the framing: the Maggiano's turnaround "is making sequential progress."

The cocktails worked. The strategy was working. The stock agreed. This article is about the half of that story that is true and the half that is not.

The Mixologist Collection launched on July 10, 2024, at all 50 Maggiano's locations system-wide. It was the chain's first cocktail-menu refresh in seven years. Four named drinks, priced between $14 and $17: a Smoked Old Fashioned built on Knob Creek Rye and served in a smoke box, a Pomegranate Martini shaken tableside, a Rosa Spritz finished with rose water, and a Grand Margarita topped with what Maggiano's calls Italian foam. Master Sommelier Jason Smith curated a six-wine Sommelier Selection list, and Maggiano's marketing pages reference a partnership with the Salvatore Ferragamo family's Il Borro estate. The campaign was framed as the brand's "next chapter" and rolled out under then-Maggiano's president Dominique Bertolone, who came to Brinker from MGM Resorts in December 2023 with a brief to "democratize luxury."

Bertolone told Restaurant Business in August 2024: "Since debuting the Mixologist Collection, Maggiano's alcoholic beverage sales have turned positive. We created an experience that is different."

On the October 30, 2024 earnings call, Hochman extended the framing further. As Restaurant Dive reported on November 21, 2024: "The cocktail innovation and master sommelier wine curation that Maggiano's launched last quarter reversed a 10-year decline in alcohol sales, Brinker CEO Kevin Hochman said during an October earnings call. The Maggiano's Old Fashioned is the chain's number one selling cocktail."

That is the thesis as Brinker told it: a structural ten-year alcohol decline, reversed by a relaunch that paired premium cocktails with a serious wine program. It became a recurring theme in Brinker's Maggiano's commentary through 2024 and 2025, and it slotted into a broader narrative the trade press has been writing for two years — that Hochman is bringing the Chili's playbook to a brand that has been quietly fading. The 2024 National Restaurant Association State of the Restaurant report found that 54% of full-service operators were planning to add new mixed-cocktail offerings that year. Maggiano's was running the play the entire industry was running, and management was telling the market the play was working.

What the Texas data actually shows

There are nine Maggiano's locations operating in Texas. They sit in Plano, Dallas (NorthPark and Love Field), DFW Airport, Austin (Domain), San Antonio (La Cantera), Friendswood (Baybrook), and Houston (Post Oak and Memorial City). Five of them have been open since 2010 — Post Oak Houston, Plano, NorthPark Dallas, Domain Austin, and La Cantera San Antonio — and form a clean same-store cohort going back 16 years. Every one of them files monthly beverage receipts with the Texas Comptroller, broken out by category: liquor, wine, beer.

The same-store cohort confirms that the ten-year decline Hochman described was real. In 2014, the five Texas Maggiano's reported $4.82 million in wine receipts. In 2024, they reported $3.25 million — a decline of 32.6% over a decade in which the chain raised menu prices and added the Sommelier Selection list. Liquor receipts at the same five venues actually grew over the period, from $1.89 million in 2014 to $2.27 million in 2024. The structural pressure on Maggiano's beverage line was specifically a wine pressure. Wine was 64.4% of the same-store beverage mix in 2014. By 2024, it was 55.0%. By 2025, 51.7%. That is the trough Hochman was describing on the October 2024 call, and the data confirms it.

The Mixologist Collection produced a measurable lift. Chain-wide Texas beverage receipts ran at $10.29 million in the trailing twelve months ending June 2024, the last full year before the launch. By April 2025, ten months in, the trailing-twelve-month figure had climbed to $11.31 million, up 11.6% year over year. That is a real number against a real baseline. The chain held the gain through the summer of 2025, with TTM beverage receipts at $11.43 million in June 2025 and $11.45 million in July 2025. For most of the year following the launch, the data agreed with the management narrative.

Then the line rolled over. By December 2025, TTM beverage receipts were back to $11.34 million and growth had slowed to +4.8% year over year. By February 2026, growth had compressed to +0.8%. By March 2026 — Brinker's Q3 FY26 print quarter — TTM receipts had fallen to $11.12 million, a -0.7% year-over-year decline. The reversal Hochman described in October 2024 lasted about one trailing-twelve-month window. The ten-year decline he said was reversed has begun to reassert itself.

The cocktails worked. The wine program didn't.

Splitting the program by category sharpens the read. Maggiano's marketed the Mixologist Collection and the Master Sommelier Selection as a single repositioning — both halves of an upmarket move the brand was making in service of the same customer. The Texas data treats them as separable, and the gap between them is the most editorially valuable finding here.

Texas liquor receipts grew 17.0% in the launch year, from $4.00 million pre-launch (TTM June 2024) to $4.68 million at T+12 (TTM June 2025). The lift was sustained: liquor receipts peaked at $4.71 million in July 2025 and held above $4.69 million as recently as February 2026. Even in the Q3 FY26 print quarter, when traffic fell 10.4%, liquor receipts were down only 3.6% year over year. By any reasonable definition — sustained growth, category-level outperformance, durable category mix shift — the cocktail relaunch worked.

Texas wine receipts did not. Wine grew 5.6% in the launch year, from $5.17 million pre-launch to $5.46 million at T+12. By December 2025, TTM wine had begun rolling over (-0.8% year over year). By March 2026, wine was -6.0% year over year. In the Q3 FY26 quarter alone, Texas wine receipts fell 12.5% — the worst category print in two years. The Master Sommelier curation, marketed as hard as the cocktails and presented as evidence of Maggiano's upmarket repositioning, moved the structural decline by less than 6% before reverting.

The same-store math underscores the point. Texas wine receipts at the legacy five locations were $4.82 million in 2014, $3.66 million in 2019, $3.25 million in 2024, and $3.15 million in 2025. There was no year in the past eleven in which wine recovered to its 2014 peak. The Mixologist Collection year was the closest the chain came, and it was still 35% below where the brand started. A six-wine Sommelier Selection list cannot do the work that two decades of consumer behavior have undone. Wine consumption has been declining structurally across U.S. casual dining, and Maggiano's — a polished-casual Italian concept whose check average runs near $32 and whose beverage mix in 2014 was 64% wine — is more exposed to that decline than almost any peer. The cocktail program was a tractable problem. The wine program was not.

What Q3 FY26 looks like at the venue level

Brinker's Q3 FY26 print captured the rollover in real time. Of the nine Texas Maggiano's, eight reported negative beverage receipts year over year in January through March 2026. The single exception was DFW Airport, which posted +1.9% — a captive-traveler economics story rather than a bar-program story. Dallas Love Field, the other airport-adjacent location, posted -7.1% but is still up 42.9% on a TTM basis versus pre-launch, reflecting how recent the venue's trajectory has been. Every directly-operated Maggiano's in Texas other than DFW Airport posted negative beverage receipts in the print quarter.

The pattern is consistent across geography. Wine fell harder than liquor at every venue except DFW Airport. The two locations with the smallest declines (DFW and Post Oak) were the only ones where liquor receipts grew or held positive. The five locations with the largest declines (NorthPark, Plano, Friendswood, Memorial City, La Cantera) all saw wine fall by 16% or more. The cocktail program is still doing work where it can. The wine program is not.

CFO Mika Ware's line on the call — that Brinker is "not immune from the industry's contracting alcohol mix" — referred specifically to Chili's, where Hochman acknowledged "some check management" in alcohol behind the chicken-sandwich-driven traffic acceleration. The Texas data shows that contraction reaching Maggiano's about a quarter ahead of the comp metric Brinker reports. The Q3 FY26 traffic figure (-10.4%) and the Q3 FY26 Texas beverage receipts figure (-8.0%) are inside a percentage point of each other. The lift the Mixologist Collection produced on liquor was not large enough to mask the wine decline once traffic turned.

Why this matters

A few things follow from the data, none of them quite the story Brinker has been telling.

First, the Mixologist Collection deserves its credit. A 17% T+12 lift on liquor receipts at the venue level, sustained through 21 months and still positive in the rollover quarter, is a real win. Cocktail program design matters and Maggiano's executed. The Smoked Old Fashioned, the Grand Margarita, and the rest of the four-drink core list moved category receipts in a measurable, durable way. If Brinker's intent was to demonstrate that operational investment in a polished-casual cocktail program could produce returns, the Texas data agrees.

Second, the broader "alcohol reversal" framing was always going to be hard to sustain because the wine half of the program was working against a different problem. Cocktail growth in casual dining is partly an industry tailwind, partly a price-mix benefit at $14 to $17 per drink, and partly genuine consumer demand for premiumized spirits. Wine growth in casual dining has none of those tailwinds. The decline Hochman correctly identified in October 2024 is structural. A six-wine Sommelier Selection list curated by a Master Sommelier did not change it, and the receipts data suggests it was never going to.

Third, the Q3 FY26 stock reaction (+14.6%) was a Chili's reaction. Maggiano's contributed roughly 8% of company sales and a low-single-digit percentage of profit, per Hochman's own comments on the call. Whatever value the market is assigning to the Maggiano's turnaround thesis is a small fraction of Brinker's enterprise value. But Brinker has been narrating the Maggiano's recovery as evidence that the Chili's playbook is portable — that what worked at one polished-casual brand can work at another. The Texas data argues that the cocktail half of the playbook ports cleanly, and the wine half does not. That distinction matters when Brinker eventually decides what to do with Maggiano's, and whether the brand needs another revision or a different kind of revision than the one currently underway.

Hochman has been disciplined, on every call going back to August 2025, about acknowledging that the Maggiano's turnaround "will take time." That language is the right language. The Texas receipts say the cocktail program already did what it could. The wine business, and the broader question of what kind of restaurant Maggiano's is at $32 a check in 2026, is the harder problem the next few quarters will have to answer. The post-launch lift was real. It was narrower than management said. And it has now rolled over.

Methodology: Beverage receipts are sourced from Texas Comptroller filings, monthly at the venue level, for all nine active Texas Maggiano's locations. Same-store analysis uses the five locations open since 2010. Trailing-twelve-month windows align to Brinker's fiscal calendar. Year-over-year comparisons match Brinker's fiscal Q3 (January through March) directly.

Sources: Brinker International Q3 FY26 earnings release (8-K, April 29, 2026); Q3 FY26 earnings call transcript; Q1 FY25 earnings call (October 30, 2024); Restaurant Dive (November 21, 2024 and prior); Restaurant Business Online (August 2024 and prior); PR Newswire (Mixologist Collection launch, July 10, 2024); Texas Comptroller mixed beverage filings.