@WineWithJon

Jonathan Frutkin

Young professionals want to love wine—but the industry keeps getting in its own way. @winewithjon gathers voices from across the business to figure out what needs to change. Winemakers, merchants, sommeliers, influencers, and educators share what’s working, what’s failing, and where we go from here. An industry conversation about wine’s future and how tech is changing everything.

  1. 28 jul

    The Arc of Life

    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. Out of that quiet came this essay — about the three stages of a life. The first: dreaming, pure desire for a life you haven't lived yet. The second: building — career, kids, marriage, the years you stop asking "what do I want?" and start asking "what do I need to do?" And the third — the one English calls "empty nest" and Spanish calls tercera edad — the stage without a real name, where the obligations lift and the dreams come back. Jon walks through all three using wine as the through-line: grape, barrel, bottle. He talks about law school, a freezing Maryland harvest, COVID-era Burgundy obsessions, his mother's three stages (Chicago, Cleveland, and an Arizona realtor's license with a biker boyfriend), Colombia and two-and-a-half-hour meals, a lake house he's building mostly as a trick to see his grandkids more — and a wine bar he didn't need, but wanted. This is the origin episode. The one that explains the person behind all the others. "The grape doesn't know it's going to be wine. The barrel doesn't know what it's building. But the bottle is where it all makes sense." Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

  2. 30 jun

    Kladstrups: Wine and War 25th Anniversary

    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 almostby accident — and have been living and writing in France ever since. In 2001, they wrote Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, andthe Battle for France's Greatest Treasure. Twenty-five years later, it's still in print in roughly twenty languages, and it's arguably the most important wine book ever written — partly because it's not really a wine book at all. It's a war story told through wine. In this 25th-anniversary conversation, Don and Petie sitdown with Jon to talk about the accidental Paris move that started it all, how two Americans got French families to open up about a chapter the French themselves wouldn't touch, why the book's second-biggest market is Germany, a 1914 Pol Roger tasting that shouldn't have been possible, a Soweto Christmasparty near the end of apartheid where someone tasted champagne for the first time, and the winemaker who told them: "Our wines evolve slowly and nobly…this gives us a taste of eternity." Guests: Don andPetie Kladstrup — authors of Wine and War, Champagne, and Champagne Charlie.Based in Paris and the Dordogne. Host: Jon Frutkin(@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, opening PrefaceWine in Delray Beach, FL.

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Young professionals want to love wine—but the industry keeps getting in its own way. @winewithjon gathers voices from across the business to figure out what needs to change. Winemakers, merchants, sommeliers, influencers, and educators share what’s working, what’s failing, and where we go from here. An industry conversation about wine’s future and how tech is changing everything.