@WineWithJon

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...

Matt Horkey has uploaded over 2,000 videos to YouTube since 2015, building his brand into one of the most respectedwine channels on the platform. His tagline: "Bringing FUN back to the world of wine." In this conversation, we talk about what it takes to build a wine YouTube channel, why lesser-known regions are more approachable than the classics, and what the traditional wine world still gets wro...

Welcome to Wine with Jon, a podcast for wine professionals thinking about the future of our industry. I'm Jonathan Frutkin—wine educator, collector, and owner of Preface Wine Bar in Delray Beach, Florida. In this first episode, I share my journey from food enthusiast to wine obsessive, and why I believe we need to have honest conversations abouthow to make wine compelling to younger generation...

A new podcast from @winewithjon. We explore the wine trade with industry leaders. Today we announce or new podcast series. Coming in April! Subscribe now.