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.

How much would you spend on an idea that every analyst says is dying? This spring, Constellation Brands answered: two hundred million dollars.

The Robert Mondavi Winery reopened in Oakville in April after a three-year renovation — at the exact moment Silicon Valley Bank was telling the wine industry the bottom was insight and nine million Americans had walked away from wine.

This week’s essay is about why that bet makes sense. The bottom quartile of wineries is drowning; the top quartile is growing, and almost all of them are places you have tovisit. Jon traces that back to 1966, when Robert Mondavi looked at an American wine industry that was a national punchline and decided it wasn’t a quality problem — it was a pricing error — then opened his doors to the public and invented the pilgrimage economy. Sixty years later, somebody paid $200 million for the idea.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Jacqueline Coleman is a fourth-generation Miamian who hasbeen covering South Florida wine since 2013 — but the whole thing started in Virginia, where a DC day job and a weekend discovery that there was wine country forty-five minutes away turned into a blog called History & Wine.

One of her early subjects was an ex-CIA officer who'd been part of the Bay of Pigs and decided in retirement to make wine. When she came home to Miami in 2013 she was the only young woman she came across in the business, and her mentordied before he could introduce her to the women he wanted her to meet. This week: what actually changed in Miami and when, why heat makes South Florida a leading indicator rather than a laggard on lighter and fresher wine, the line from a room of hospitality students that stuck with her — wine needs to tell adifferent story — and why guests at her bar have started asking for guidance instead of ordering what they always order.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

This week: Amanda McCrossin —SommVivant — on why the wine industry doesn’t have a simplification problem, ithas a translation problem.

Amanda is a certified sommelier who ran the wine program at PRESS in Napa and has since built an audience of roughly half a million people by making wine feel approachable without dumbing it down. She and Jon talk about her path from a non-drinking household outside Philadelphia to one of America’s great wine lists, why she started filming a winery a day in 2015, how she handles brand partnerships without losing trust,and what she notices standing quietly in an ordinary wine shop — the label doing all the marketing, 91 versus 92 deciding the sale, and shoppers who are moving faster than we think. Plus her fix: a wine store organized around how you actually live.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Four guys at a steakhouse order bourbon, an old fashioned, and a beer — and the guy who actually wants the Barolo orders bourbon anyway.

This week's essay is about that hesitation. Wine is five thousand years old and was never gendered anywhere — until, in about forty years, American culture quietly stamped it pink. Jon walks through the numbers (only ~16% of American men who drink prefer wine; in France and Italy men out-drink women on it), the three forces that did it — marketing, media, and the culture of expertise — and what it's costing everyone, including the women it supposedly belongs to. The fix isn't camo labels and rugged fonts. It's de-gendering wine entirely, and giving everyone permission to not know yet.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

This week: Raj Parr — one of the most influential sommeliers America has produced — on why he left the dining room for the dirt.

Raj ran the wine program for the Michael Mina Restaurant Group, co-founded Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte, helpedlead the push toward balance in California wine, and co-wrote the James Beard Award–winning Sommelier’s Atlas of Taste. Now he farms by hand at Phelan Farms in Cambria. He and Jon trace the improbable path — Calcutta to culinary school,65 rejection-adjacent job offers, a borrowed one-way ticket, and Larry Stone’s blind tastings — then the harder second act: regenerative farming, the one-shot-a-year math of winegrowing, and why the industry’s conversation has shifted from the cellar to the soil.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.