@WineWithJon

Peru made wine before Chile and before Argentina — vines went in during the 1540s — and then history took it away: Spanish export restrictions, earthquakes, and a war with Chile that destroyed the southern vineyards. Peru turned to pisco and sweet wine. Daniel Valverde, the youngest of five kids raised by a single mother, left Peru at eighteen, worked his way from busboy to beverage director at Th...

Burgundy — the region everyone said was bulletproof — is down about a third from its 2022 peak. This week is aletter from London, where the fine wine secondary market actually lives: bonded warehouses, barcoded cases, and a screen called Liv-ex where the price of the world's most collected wine gets set. After three years of steady decline, thepeople who make markets in this stuff are saying t...

Anya Myalyuk was born above the Arctic Circle, in a familywhere her father drank vodka and her mother drank Soviet champagne. She arrived in New York at twenty-two without real English, got waiting jobs by lying on her résumé, and started reading the wine lists. A manager pointed her at Gary Vaynerchuk; then she watched SOMM and decided that same night to find out howyou become one. What makes her...

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 seduce...

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...

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 San...

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...