The Taste with Doug Shafer – a Podcast About Wine, Food, and Friends

In this episode, we welcome our longtime friend David Ilsley, whose family has been part of Napa Valley's grape-growing and winemaking community for more than 70 years. David's grandfather purchased the family's first vineyard in 1954. Since then they have expanded their acreage and moved into vineyard management and winemaking along the way. David grew up in the heart of Napa Valley and attended...

Cuong Pham has one of the most remarkable stories we've ever heard on the podcast. He escaped Vietnam in 1979 and lived in a refugee camp in Malaysia before making it to the U.S. Here he became an engineer at Apple in its early days where he built a long, successful career. In the early 2000s, with a longing for the flavors of his mother's cooking, he began the work of creating Red Boat Fish Sauce...

Blake Van Treese has one of the best vantage points in the wine business. As president of Last Bottle, First Bottle, Last Bubbles, and several other online wine retail brands, he sees firsthand how consumers are discovering, purchasing, and talking about wine. Growing up in Napa Valley, Blake's connection to wine runs deep. After first pursuing his love of music in college, he returned to Napa and...

The city of Napa was once better known for its car dealerships and dive bars than for top-tier dining. That changed in the late 1990s when a young chef named Greg Cole, against the advice of others, rolled the dice on launching a small restaurant called Celadon. When Celadon became a sensation, he followed it up by opening the now-legendary Cole’s Chop House. Chef Cole’s path to helping reinvent N...

Nile Zacherle was once advised he needed to choose between making wine and brewing beer. Fortunately he didn't take that advice. Instead, he takes a winemaker's approach to producing an array of phenomenal beers under the Mad Fritz brand that he manages with his wife, Whitney Fisher. At the same time, Nile crafts gorgeous wines for David Arthur Vineyards, located in Napa's renowned Pritchard Hill...

Where wine, community, and technology converge, you'll find the phenomenon of CellarTracker and its founder Eric LeVine. The numbers are staggering: 1.1 million registered users have tracked 200 million wines and posted more than 12 million reviews. Eric takes us through the story of CellarTracker's beginning with his years at Microsoft, which coincided with his growing love of wine. As his person...

Winemaker Robert Foley knows exactly when wine won him over – it was 1969 when he got the rare chance to visit the cellars at Inglenook and taste classic wines out of casks. With this inspiration, he went on to study winemaking at UC Davis with a who's who of future winemaking stars. His story is legendary. Straight out of Davis, he landed a job at Heitz Cellars, working with Joe Heitz. He went on...

In this classic episode, Paula Kornell takes us on an exceptional journey spanning two continents, one war, and more than 60 years of Napa Valley winemaking. Her father, Hanns Kornell, a third-generation winemaker in Germany, managed to escape a Nazi concentration camp, make his way to America, and found a winery near Calistoga specializing in sparkling wine. Paula was born the year after the wine...

In this classic episode, Robin Lail of Lail Vineyards takes us on an unbelievable family journey. Her roots in Napa Valley span nearly all of winemaking history here – from her great-grand-uncle, Gustave Niebaum, establishing Inglenook in 1879, through her father, John Daniel, rebuilding the winery after Prohibition in the 1930s, to the birth and boom of Napa's current era, working with names like...

Markus Bokisch has spent his life savoring the best of two worlds. As a kid in Los Angeles, he spent his summers in a small village on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where his family’s roots run deep. Later, after studying winemaking and viticulture at UC Davis and then working with the vineyard team at Joseph Phelps, Markus and his wife, Liz, set off on an adventure across Spain—living out of a 196...

Jeff Smith grew up in Napa Valley where his dad, Ned Smith, sold real estate in the 1960s. In the early '70s, Ned moved into the hotel business building Napa's first luxury hotel, Wine Country Inn, and simultaneously planted six acres of grapes. Like many kids who grow up here, a future in the wine industry wasn't Jeff's first dream – his was music. He pursued a successful career centered in the B...

Russ Weis grew up in California's Central Valley surrounded by his family's 200 acres of grapes, a background that would eventually lead him to a career in wine. His story runs through early adventures in France and Japan and then to Christian Brothers – where he started as a tour guide – Robert Mondavi Winery, Opus One, Silverado Vineyards, and today with Walsh Vineyard Management. He's seen ever...

Kim Stare Wallace tells the audacious story of her father, Dave Stare, a wine-loving MIT graduate, who moved to California in a station wagon. He built a winery and carved out brand new vineyards near Healdsburg, California, in Dry Creek Valley in 1972. Dry Creek Vineyard made a name pioneering both Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc in an era that favored red varieties. Kim grew up helping out on t...

Robert Fiore's path to winemaking took a remarkable trek through archeology and geophysics. Long before he was tasting grapes in the lead-up to harvest he was poring over data from ground-penetrating radar in the search for petroleum. But it turns out that knowing rocks and soil is a solid foundation for a deep understanding of great vineyards. Today Robert is winemaker at the long-celebrated Pete...

In this classic episode, we revisit a memorable 2019 podcast with Tim Mondavi, whose family played such a legendary role in launching and defining Napa Valley's current era. Tim spent more than 30 years working with his father at Robert Mondavi Winery until the family lost control of winery in 2004. Undaunted, he started over with a new winery aptly named Continuum. Today Tim and his extended fami...

This week's episode is a medley, a grab bag, a breakfast scramble of your questions for Doug -- covering everything from "when should I drink my 2018" to when your wine needs to make some noise to his picks for Napa Valley's unsung heroes. (Also, one of us may have admitted to once using a blender to decant a wine.) We invited our long-time friend, John Skupny, of Lang & Reed to join us for th...

Heidi Barrett has produced extraordinary wines for clients including Screaming Eagle, Paradigm, Dalle Valle, and many more. One of her Cabernets holds the record as the most ever paid for a single bottle of wine -- $500,000 at Auction Napa Valley. Today she has her own wine brand, La Sirena, and another with her husband, Bo Barrett of Chateau Montelena, called Barrett & Barrett. On this classi...

It's harvest here on the West Coast and this week we're letting our winemaking friends focus on picking their grapes. We thought this would be the perfect moment to rerelease a classic 'Taste' episode that we recorded with our friend, the great actor and vintner, Kyle MacLachlan. Since we recorded this episode in October, 2018, Kyle has continued to produce outstanding wines with his Pursued by Be...

In the early 1980s, Lee Hudson, still in his 20s, was one of the first to recognize the promise of Los Carneros, Napa Valley's gorgeous southernmost growing region. He came to Napa Valley by way of Texas, where he grew up and fell in love with agriculture. After earning a degree in horticulture he learned the intricacies of grape growing during a stint in Burgundy before studying in the enology Ma...

James Hall proved that you actually can go home again when, in 2024, he bought back the winery he'd sold nearly 10 years earlier. We had a great time talking with James, getting the background on a fascinating career and learning more about Patz & Hall winery in Sonoma. He grew up in Santa Cruz, California, where his father was an English professor. On family travels in Europe, James was first...

Jeb Dunnuck's journey to becoming a globally recognized wine critic took an unexpected path, starting in Indiana farmland, where he grew up, then through an early career as an engineer for NASA, working on high-profile projects such as the Kepler Space Telescope. Along the way though, he fell in love with the wines of the Rhône Valley and putting his engineering skills to work built a website and...

Judd Finkelstein's earliest memories are all about life at a Napa Valley winery. In the 1970s his parents started Whitehall Lane Winery, later selling and moving across the Valley to launch Judd's Hill Winery. Judd says like so many who grow up here, he had to move away from Napa Valley to truly appreciate it. Initially after college, he worked in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles until fe...

We first got to know Pat Monahan when he and his Grammy-winning band Train filmed much of the 2012 music video for their hit song "Drive By" at Shafer Vineyards (which has earned more than 200 million views on YouTube). We knew right away that Pat was a wine fan based both on our interactions with him that day and because we learned that he helmed the successful "Save Me San Francisco Wine Company...

Bobby Stuckey loves creating welcoming, inspired spaces in his restaurants both for customers and employees, seeing hospitality as a mission as much as a career. Bobby’s story starts in Arizona where he grew up “a dyslexic, ADHD kid,” who wasn’t finding success in school. Fortunately he landed a position as a busboy in a local restaurant and soon realized that pouring his energy into that job came...

Suzanne Deal Booth is a fairly recently name to Napa Valley in that her first released vintage was 2018 from Bella Oaks winery, a property with a rich legacy. More recently she purchased Wheeler Farms on Zinfandel Lane, just south of St. Helena. Her story, though, begins not in wine but in art restoration and preservation, a passion that has taken her to iconic sites around the world. Today she co...