@WineWithJon

Jonathan Frutkin
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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.

  1. 20 hr ago

    A Thing of Beauty: Remembering Sam Neill

    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 strange arithmetic of a grapevine: plant it today, get nothing for years, and the best fruit arrives long after you might. Which means nobody plants a vine for themselves. Then a story out of southern Ukraine — a winegrower tending vines with a rocket buried in a row of chardonnay — makesthe point unavoidable. Wheat feeds you this winter. A vine is a bet that there will be winters worth surviving for. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  2. 18 Aug

    Your Parents' Wine

    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, who aren't rejecting a style of wine so much as opting out of wine altogether. Jon walks through why that's happening, why chasing them with cans and edgy labels backfires, and what actually works instead — making space, and getting out of the way. The bottle changes. The table doesn't. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  3. 11 Aug

    Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible

    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 dollars, collected 325rejection slips before her first sale, and — to earn a seat tasting with the men who ran wine then — agreed not to speak for six years. She and Jon talk about the book she wished she’d had, why wine education got too standardized, Come Over October, and why wine belongs to well-being and connection, not theabstinence-vs-abuse binary. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  4. 4 Aug

    Michael Amorosia, @TheAmorosiaCellar

    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 wineon a delayed-honeymoon Napa trip, he now argues that wine has been turned into a test — credentials, vocabulary, performance — when it should be a bottle at the table that opens your night. He and Jon talk aspiration vs. accessibility, what the U.S. can learn from Europe, and how to build a room newcomers actually want to walk into. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  5. 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.

  6. 21 Jul

    Hillary Cole, Vineyards of War

    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 she once read a battlespace: why Champagne became the drink of celebration in a region leveled by war every century, theKosovo full-circle moment that bookended her two careers, and why she teaches beginners structure and history instead of tasting notes — because “tasting notes can’t give youhumanity.” New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  7. 14 Jul

    Kelli White, Napa Valley

    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, which argues there’s no wrong way to enjoy wine. She and Jon talk about what living among the growers taught her (wine is agriculture, full stop), why tasting-note “winespeak” makes people feel like they’re failing a test, and why a first trip to wine country might be the best thing that ever happens to a curious drinker. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

  8. 7 Jul

    The "Josh" Problem

    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 owned by the same companies — and that a ladder exists. Constellation owns Josh, Robert Mondavi, The Prisoner, and Schrader. Gallo owns Barefoot, Apothic, William Hill, and Orin Swift. Thearchitecture is already built. The industry just refuses to make it visible. Jon calls it the Josh Problem. In this essay, he walks through howMercedes, Rolex, and Tudor get this right; how LVMH actually does it in wine with Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon; how Coca-Cola makes its portfolio legible under the exact same distribution constraints wine claims it can't overcome;who pays the price when the ladder stays hidden; and why the work of building it now falls to wine bars, retailers, sommeliers, and the people building places like Preface Wine. "Wine hides the ladders. And then we wonder why people feel lost. The ladders exist. Someone just needs to turn on the lights." Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, opening Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Jonathan Frutkin
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Jonathan Frutkin
  • Show Website
    @WineWithJon

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