@WineWithJon

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 a...

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...

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 outsid...

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...

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...

In 1993, a working actor planted five acres of pinot noir at the bottom of the world, in a region most people said was too cold to grow anything serious. His neighbors thought it was ahobby. Sam Neill died last month, and two completely different sets of obituaries ran for the same man — one for the movie star, one in the wine trade press. This week’s essay is about the secondone, and about the st...

What did your parents actually drink — not what they taught you about wine, but what was in the fridge? This week is a solo essay about that question, and the pattern it reveals: every generation rejects the wine its parents loved. Jug wine became Robert Parker's scores. The boomers' big Napa Cabs gave way to Gen X skepticism and then the millennial natural-wine rebellion. And now Gen Z, w...

This week: Karen MacNeil —author of The Wine Bible, creator of WineSpeed, and founder of Come Over October — on the improbable road from a runaway teenager drinking 89-cent Bulgarian reds to the most decorated wine writer in America. Karen grew up poor in the Nevada desert, ran away at fourteen, and taught herself wine over the cheapest bottles in the shop. She landed in 1970s New York with six do...

This week: Michael Amorosia — founder of The Amorosia Cellar and former frontman of the faceless hardcore band REACTIONS — on why “wine is failing the room,” and how to make it the move for the next generation. Michael went from covering his face on stage (so fans reacted to the music, not the image) to putting a face on a wine industry that’s been faceless forever. A whiskey guy who fell for wine...

The most personal essay Jon has shared on this show. It starts at a graduation — a giant fairground hall, his son crossing a stage on a monitor from thirty rows back, eighteen years condensed into a four-second walk. After the ceremony, Jon drove back to a Hilton Garden Inn next to a freeway because he'd sold the house. His ex-wife turned to him and said, "I don't know what to do." Neither did he....

This week: Hillary Cole — former Air Force intelligence officer and author of Vineyards of War — on what wine and warfare have always had in common. Hilary spent ten years in intelligence (a Russian linguist reassigned to counterterrorism on 9/11) before a glass of Barolo rerouted her life into wine. Now a French wine scholar living in Albania, she joins Jon to talk about reading a wine the way sh...

This week: Kelli White — wine writer, decade-long sommelier, and director of education at Meadowood — on Napa as a conversion engine and why the way we talk about wine keepsturning newcomers away. Kelli went from a Howard Hughes Fellowship in neurogenetics to writing two of the most talkedabout wine books of the last decade: Napa Valley Then & Now, the encyclopedic history, andWine Confident,...

Jon walked into a BMW dealership and put a deposit down on a car that hadn't arrived yet. He didn't need the salesperson to explain anything — the brand had spent decades showing him the ladder. Then he walked into his local Publix wine aisle and watched the whole system fall apart. Five hundred bottles. Five hundred unrelated labels. What no consumer can see is that many of those bottles are owne...

Don and Petie Kladstrup are two of the most accomplishedjournalists to ever turn their lens toward wine. Don is a three-time Emmy winner who covered the fall of theBerlin Wall, wars in the Middle East, and the battle against apartheid for CBS and ABC. Petie won the Overseas Press Club Award and served as protocol officer for the U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO. They moved to Paris in the late 1970s almo...

Georgia Panagopoulou was a chemical engineer. Then she walked away from a "safe corporate job" in the middle of Greece's financial crisis, moved to Santorini, and enrolled in a Master's program that took her to 30 wine countries in 18 months. She documented the whole thing on Instagram — andaccidentally became one of the most followed wine voices in Europe. Today she runs Wine Gi...

My grandfather went from kerosene to AOL. One life. That kind of speed creates a craving for something slower — something that anchors you to a specific time and place. Wine might be the most powerful nostalgia machine ever invented, because every bottle carries something almost nothing else does: a year. In this solo episode, I explore why that year matters, how wine bridges generations at a dinn...

The wine industry has a generational problem — and almost nothing it believes about it is true. Pauline Vicard runs ARENI Global, the leading international think tank on the future of fine wine. Her team studied how young people in six cities — Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai — actually get into fine wine. They started with six hypotheses. Only one held up. In this conversa...

Eric LeVine found wine "hopelessly intimidating" — until a 1999bike trip through Tuscany changed everything. A few years later, he built CellarTracker during a Microsoft sabbatical. It's now the world's largest wine community: 13+ million tasting notes, 175 million bottles tracked, nearly a million users. We talk about what two decades of community data reveal about how people actually engage with...

What does a $25,000 bottle of Burgundy have to do with the $14 Pinot Noir at Trader Joe's? More than you'd think. Most people assume the fine wine world is a parallel universe for rich people — disconnected from the wine the rest of us actually drink. In this essay, Jon makes the opposite case: the top of the wine world is the reason the rest of it works. Using the Ferrari-and-Toyota analogy — the...

Sam Capaldi liquidated her savings at 22 to go to sommelier school. Today she's the "No Snob Somm" — 300,000+ followers, a wine club, a wine label, and a community built by pairing wine with Taco Bell instead of white tablecloths. In this episode, Sam and Jon get into why the wine industry keeps losing the next generation, what COVID virtual tastings taught her about what people actually want, the...

Joe Emmett came from music into wine — and landed at Berry Bros & Rudd, Britain's oldest wine merchant. 326 years of history. He works with a younger clientele, giving him a unique perspective on how a historic institution connects with a new generation. We recorded this in person at their St James's Street original HQ in London. We talk about what younger clients want, how to balance heritage...

Chris Zago went from running food and beverage at a premiercountry club in St. Louis to pursuing his true passion — wine. For the past seven years, he’s been the Director of Advisory Services at UOVO Wine, the largest wine storage and collection services network in the United States. He works with everyone from first-time collectors to people with legendary cellars. In this conversation, we talk a...

The Surgeon General says loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Young people are spending 70% less time together in person. And at the exact same moment, we'veconvinced them to stop drinking — removing one of humanity's oldest tools for connection. In this solo episode, I make a case. Not for drinking more. But for understanding what we've lost, and what wine might hel...

JC Restrepo and his wife Joanna came from Colombia with nothing and built one of South Florida's most beloved wine destinations — Happy Wine Calle Ocho in Little Havana. The New York Times named it to their Top 25 Miami Restaurants list in 2024. They did it without marketing budgets or PR campaigns. Just live music every night, graffiti-covered walls, cheap corkage, and a philosophy the Times summ...

Lucina Sinclair went from Soho House — one of the world’s best membership organizations — to 67 Pall Mall, one of the world’s best wine clubs. She did it without a traditional wine background. When she joined, she immediately started her WSET certification — learning wine while running membership at a world-class club. Before wine, she worked in the music industry, including with Pete Tong. She kn...