I was on a hillside in Napa, twenty minutes into geeking out about a vineyard, when my friend Chandler — whocould not care less about the Harlan family tree — started beaming. I asked her why. "I’m just excited to see YOU so excited."

That’s this whole episode. She caught the feeling, not the facts. Matt Horkey’s mentor said it better than I can: wine needs less educators and more seducers. This week I make the casethat the industry has the sequence backwards — we hand people the textbook before we’ve played them the song. There’s the woman who quit wine after one question in a tasting room, the difference between performing expertise andsharing discovery, the winemaker with eighty perfect scores who describes his wine like a car crash into a chocolate shop, and why I hire for enthusiasm over credentials. Teaching creates students. Sharing creates friends.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Doug Frost's uncle poured him a 1968 Louis Martini SpecialSelect Pinot Noir when he was fifteen — his first glass of wine ever. He told that story so often that Mike Martini eventually sent him a bottle of the same wine, which he used to ambush his aunt and uncle at dinner decades later. He has a degree in acting and directing, won his first wine contest by doing animpression of the restaurant's wine steward, and then sat the Master Sommelier and Master of Wine exams at the same time, which he says is not a good idea. He passed the theory first go and flunked the tasting. Today he's one of a handful of people alive holding both titles, buys wine for United Airlines, won an Emmy for a PBS wine show, and owns Echolands in Walla Walla. This week: what happens to aroma at altitude, why he chose Walla Walla over Napa, chillable reds nine years before they were cool, goats and sheep between the rows — and his flatrefusal to blame consumers for not buying the wine. When something doesn't sell, the trade says people need to be better educated. His answer: no, that's our fault.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Ray Isle's first real memory of wine is lying on a floor incollege while someone squeezed it into his mouth from a bag.

The bottle that actually changed things was a Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill Cabernet at a dinner in the late eighties — first sip whatever, third sip what the hell is this. He was writing fiction at the time. What pulled him across was the stories: working harvest, he met a Santa Cruz Mountains vineyard manager who shot a deer, skinned it, wore the skin through the vineyard, and lost his whole crew when they decided he was a warlock. Now he's the executive wine editor at Food & Wine, the wine guy on TODAY, and the author of The World in a Wine Glass — 275 producer profiles built on the belief that knowing who made a wine changes how it tastes. We get into the Taco Bell test for what's actually artisanal, why he'd rather write about a $25 Rhône than a $700 Burgundy, the pricing gap driving young drinkers away, and which half of biodynamics he thinks is bonkers.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.