Get ready to pop the cork because we're diving into the world of wine in a totally fresh way! Forrest Kelly chats with Jeff Gillis, the mastermind behind The Wine Likes App, where the goal is to make wine tasting more social and, let’s be real, way more fun. We get the inside scoop on how the app uses quirky questions—like whether you prefer salt on your fries—to match you with wines you might not know you’d love. Jeff spills the tea on why they’re ditching the AI and algorithms, championing good ol’ human interaction instead. So, whether you're a wine newbie or a seasoned sommelier, this convo is packed with tips, laughs, and the kind of wine wisdom that’ll have you saying, “Cheers!” in no time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The Wine Likes App is all about enhancing your wine experience through personalized tasting profiles, making wine exploration feel like a fun game rather than a chore. Jeff Gillis emphasizes that drinking wine should be about personal preference, so if you love red with fish, who cares about the rules?! The app proudly avoids AI and algorithms, focusing instead on genuine user interactions and real wine enthusiasts sharing their insights, which is quite refreshing! With a unique grape icon system, users can easily identify sommeliers and winemakers, promoting transparency and trust within the wine community. The creators of the app believe that everyone, whether a novice or expert, should feel comfortable sharing their wine adventures and asking questions without any judgment. By shifting focus from traditional social media to engaging games, The Wine Likes App aims to make discovering new wines a fun and social experience rather than just scrolling through posts.

Get ready to pop some corks because we’re diving into something truly revolutionary—The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is introducing an Industry-exclusive, Winery in a Box! That's right; it’s a bonsai-crafted vineyard experience that fits snugly inside a 16-cube box. Imagine strolling into your backyard to find your tiny vineyard, complete with blueprints for a micro wine cellar and a charming tasting room. In this episode, Forrest Kelly chats with the ever-witty Venture Capitalist Mark MyWerds about how they’ve teamed up with experts to make this dream a reality, all while keeping the banter as bubbly as the finest Chardonnay. So, whether you're a seasoned sommelier or just someone who enjoys a good glass of wine, tune in to discover how you can cultivate your own vintage legacy without the need for acres of land!Follow Us on Social: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod -www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Visit our newest addition to the Best 5 Minute Podcast Network - The Best 5 Minute Travel PodcastPicture this: you wake up, stretch your arms, step outside, and BAM! There's your very own vineyard right in your backyard. No, I’m not talking about a sprawling estate in Napa Valley or some picturesque Tuscan setting. I’m talking about a revolutionary concept that Mark MyWerds and I have been cooking up: Winery in a Box. Seriously, we’ve distilled the entire vineyard experience into a 16-cube box that you can plop down almost anywhere! This episode is a whirlwind tour of how we’ve transformed the art of winemaking into a sophisticated endeavor, making it accessible to everyone, even if you've got just a tiny patch of grass to work with.Mark and I dive into the nitty-gritty of this brilliant idea, crafted with the help of a world-class vintner, a bonsai tree expert, and an architect who clearly had a blast thinking small. Imagine bonsai-trained wine vines that can start producing grapes in just one season! Think about it: you get to cultivate your very own grapes, create your first bottle, and celebrate it with a custom label that’s yours forever—your legacy in a bottle! But that’s not all; we’ve included blueprints for a cozy little winery house with an adorable tasting room and a micro wine cellar to store your precious bottles. Yep, we’re talking about a complete wine experience that fits in your pocket—well, almost.As we wrap up our chat, I can’t help but marvel at how this project not only brings the joys of winemaking into the hands of amateurs but also fosters a sense of community and connection to nature. It’s all about sipping, savoring, and sharing your creations with friends and family—not to mention bragging rights at the next BBQ. So, if you’ve ever dreamt of having your own vineyard but thought it was out of reach, let us guide you...

We’re diving into the delightful world of wine in today’s chat with Jeff Gillis, the mastermind behind the WineLikes app! The main squeeze? We’re all about making wine education a blast rather than a boring classroom snooze-fest. Inspired by the pandemic-era wine sipping and some clever tech influences from his kiddos, Jeff reveals how he’s gamified the whole wine tasting experience. It’s like a fun wine party in your pocket, complete with social media vibes, quizzes, and even a cheeky wine word game called Winedle. So pour yourself a glass, kick back, and let’s explore how we can sip, learn, and laugh our way through the wonderful world of vino!Please Follow Us on Social Media: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod -www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Visit our newest addition to the Best 5 Minute Podcast Network - The Best 5 Minute Travel Podcast

Join host Forrest Kelly and guest David Aferiat as they explore the delightful world of champagne pairings, emphasizing the unexpected and exquisite combinations that elevate any meal. David shares his passion for pairing champagne with dishes featuring dill, like eggs and frittatas, highlighting how the right bubbles can create a toe-curling experience. The conversation takes a fun turn as they discuss food pairings that might raise eyebrows, such as champagne with Indian cuisine or tzatziki sauce, showcasing the versatility of this sparkling beverage. David also reveals the persona behind his champagne brand, affectionately named Donna, who embodies social warmth and wellness. As they wrap up, listeners are treated to a heartfelt toast in multiple languages, celebrating good health, food, and friendships, leaving them inspired to elevate their own dining experiences with champagne.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Champagne pairs wonderfully with dishes that have dill, like eggs or frittatas, creating delightful flavor combinations. Unconventional pairings, such as softer champagnes with Indian food, can elevate your dining experience. The persona of 'Donna' represents the ideal champagne enthusiast who embodies social wellness and confidence. Sharing champagne with historical figures like Napoleon reflects its role in celebrating victories and soothing losses. It's essential to serve champagne at the right temperature to enhance its flavors and overall experience. Never serve champagne with ice cubes; proper chilling methods maintain its quality and enjoyment.

We're diving headfirst into the wild world of St. Patrick's Day celebrations, and trust me, it’s going to be a green-tinted rollercoaster ride! Forget the boring old traditions; we’re serving up a recipe for the most questionable green wine imaginable. I mean, who knew that blending Sauvignon blanc with spinach and crushed Skittles could lead to such a beautifully disastrous concoction? It’s all about embracing those poor life choices while sipping on what we've hilariously dubbed the “Emerald Elixir of Desperation.” So, buckle up as we navigate through this culinary chaos, share some witty banter, and throw in a few tips on how to not only survive but thrive during this festive madness. You might even want to call in sick to work on Tuesday—just saying!Please Follow Us on Social Media: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod -www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Visit our newest addition to the Best 5 Minute Podcast Network - The Best 5 Minute Travel PodcastTakeaways: We kicked off the episode with a hilariously absurd idea for St. Patrick's Day that involves questionable wine choices and spinach, because why not? Our concoction of green wine includes crushed Skittles and a dash of regret, making it the perfect drink for celebrating bad decisions and overcooked corned beef. Naming our bizarre beverage is key, so we suggest something fancy like "Emerald Elixir of Desperation" to distract from its questionable ingredients. The taste test revealed that our green wine tastes like a bad attitude in liquid form, but at least it embodies the spirit of St. Patrick's Day! We remind everyone to enjoy St. Patrick's Day safely, as nothing screams festive like a hangover from our questionable drink choices. In the end, we embraced the chaos of holiday traditions, highlighting the absurdity of participating in celebrations we don't quite understand.

Discover how to elevate your everyday moments with organic champagne in this lively discussion featuring Forrest Kelly and David Aferiat from Avid Vines. They challenge the misconception that champagne is only for special occasions, advocating instead for its inclusion in your daily life, even pairing it with the simplest of meals like Indian takeout. With insightful tips on choosing the right champagnes to enhance any dining experience, David shares his mantras that encourage listeners to celebrate themselves. The conversation dives into the versatility of champagne, emphasizing its role as a palate cleanser and a delightful complement to food. Don't miss the chance to explore the world of organic champagnes and how they can transform your routine into something extraordinary.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Champagne should not be reserved for special occasions; you are the special occasion. Elevating everyday meals, like Indian takeout, can be done with organic champagne pairings. Pairing champagne with food enhances flavors and cleanses the palate with every sip. Organic champagnes can complement a variety of dishes, not just traditional pairings. The mantra 'may the reward merit the routine' applies to enjoying quality champagnes. Don't wait for a special moment to enjoy fine champagne; make any day special. Links referenced in this episode:avidvines.com

Pouring a proper glass of wine might sound simple, but trust me, it’s a bit of an art form that requires finesse—don’t go treating that bottle like it's ketchup at a diner! Today, we're diving into the nitty-gritty of wine pouring with our resident wine guru, Forrest Kelly, who’s here to school us on the dos and don'ts of getting that perfect pour. From holding the bottle with a touch of elegance (no barbaric grips, please) to mastering the elusive bottle twist that saves us from tragic dribbles, we've got all the tips you need to elevate your wine game. And let’s not forget about the importance of letting that wine breathe—it's like giving your favorite novel a moment to unfold before you dive into the juicy chapters! So grab your glasses, folks; it's time to sip smart and impress your friends at the next wine shindig!Please Follow Us on Social Media: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod -www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Visit our newest addition to the Best 5 Minute Podcast Network - The Best 5 Minute Travel PodcastTakeaways: Pouring wine is an art; don't just grab the bottle like a ketchup squeeze! The perfect pour is all about finesse—aim for that smooth 45-degree angle! Remember, a proper pour is about five ounces, not a refill on your thirst! Twisting the bottle at the end is essential to avoid those embarrassing drips! Wine deserves a moment to breathe, so swirl, sniff, and then sip it right! And hey, no barbarian pouring, folks—let's keep it classy at the wine table!

Sour Grapes is at it again, folks, and this time he's cooking up a plan that’s equal parts wild and questionable! He’s convinced that the Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast isn’t giving him enough airtime, so he’s ready to take drastic measures—like shaving his dog Bubbly and tattooing #justiceforsourgrapes on his fur. Seriously, this level of commitment to self-promotion is both impressive and a little alarming! We dive into this hair-raising (literally) scheme, with some witty banter about canine consent and the fine line between creativity and madness. So, buckle up, because we’re about to embark on a journey filled with grape-fueled shenanigans and a sprinkle of grumpy wisdom, all while pondering if Bubbly is indeed on board with this whole tattoo idea. Grab your glass and let’s get into it!Please Follow Us on Social Media: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod -www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Visit our newest addition to the Best 5 Minute Podcast Network - The Best 5 Minute Travel PodcastTakeaways: In a world of podcasting, airtime is the new currency, and Sour Grapes is ready to cash in! When life gives you lemons, tattoo your dog with a hashtag for justice – that’s Sour Grapes’ philosophy! Forrest and Sour Grapes prove that the quest for podcast fame can lead to some hairy situations – literally! Who needs a PR team when you have a dog named Bubbly and a wild idea for justice? A vineyard pattern tattoo on a dog? Now that's what I call a classy statement in the face of adversity! Sour Grapes teaches us that sometimes you just have to go to extremes for your voice to be heard!

Forrest Kelly engages in an enlightening conversation with David Aferiat, founder of Avid Vines, who shares his unique journey from economics graduate to purveyor of organic champagne. David reminisces about his formative experiences in Southern France, where he not only honed his culinary appreciation through the lens of a host family’s kitchen but also cultivated a deep connection to his cultural roots. He reflects on how his dual citizenship and upbringing shaped his perspective, blending American and French influences into his personal and professional life. This rich background laid the groundwork for his passion for champagne, which came to fruition after a pivotal family trip to the Champagne region in 2018. David emphasizes the importance of understanding the craftsmanship behind champagne production, advocating for visits to both large and small producers to appreciate the nuances of their methods and the significance of organic practices. Takeaways: David Aferiat shares his journey of bridging French and American cultures through his work. Living in France greatly influenced David's appreciation for high-quality ingredients and cooking. David emphasizes the importance of visiting both large and small Champagne houses for a true experience. The organic and sustainable practices of artisanal Champagne growers are essential to David's mission. Avid Vines offers an exclusive wine club featuring carefully selected artisanal organic Champagne. David encourages listeners to embrace self-care by enjoying Champagne, not just on special occasions. Links referenced in this episode:avidvines.comYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Join hosts Forrest Kelly and David Aferiat as they dive into the world of organic champagne in this engaging episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. David, the founder of Avid Vines, shares his journey from Buffalo, New York, to becoming a connoisseur of fine wines and champagnes, emphasizing the importance of organic production methods. He highlights the unique experiences that come from enjoying champagne made by dedicated growers who prioritize quality over quantity. With a rich background in food and hospitality, David discusses how his love for culinary experiences shaped his palate and appreciation for exceptional wines. Listeners will be inspired to explore the world of organic champagne and understand the value of savoring every moment with quality beverages.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: David Aferiat emphasizes the importance of organic champagne, sourced directly from owner-growers in France. Growing up in diverse locations shaped David's appreciation for wine and culinary experiences. David's journey into the wine industry began with a love for sharing great food and drink. The commitment to organic practices ensures a purer taste and reduces health issues like headaches. David aims to elevate the champagne experience, focusing on unique, smaller producers rather than mass-produced brands. His background in hospitality helped him curate exceptional dining experiences, enhancing his wine knowledge. Links referenced in this episode:avidvines.com

Get ready to uncork some delightful conversation with Forrest Kelly and our special guest, Rasmus Emborg, as we dive into the pink-hued world of rosé wine. Rasmus takes us on a joyride through his book, “Rosé Revolution,” where he spills the tea on how this once-overlooked wine has transformed into a pop culture superstar. He skillfully navigates the complexities of our current world—yes, we’re talking about writing about wine while the weight of global events looms large—while reminding us that joy and pleasure are still on the menu. We chat about the swirling trends in wine consumption—spoiler alert: red wine isn’t the reigning champ anymore—and how a new generation of wine lovers is shaking things up, ditching the snootiness for something more approachable and fun. So grab a glass, sit back, and let’s toast to the fascinating stories behind our favorite pink drink!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Rasmus emphasizes the importance of enjoying life, especially through good wine, amidst global chaos. The popularity of rosé wine reflects changing consumer habits towards lighter, more approachable options. Social media has played a huge role in making rosé a pop culture sensation, with its vibrant colors stealing the spotlight. Rasmus discusses how younger generations have revolutionized their approach to wine, moving away from traditional norms. Companies mentioned in this episode: Interlink Publishing Simon & Schuster

Get the Book here: Amazon - Simon & Shuster - Barnes & NobleRasmus Emborg dives headfirst into the world of rosé wine, and let me tell you, it's not just a pretty pink drink anymore—it's a full-on revolution! We chat about how this once-maligned beverage has shed its old reputation and transformed into a legit contender in the wine scene. Rasmus shares some juicy stories about producers who dared to dream big, like Lucien from Château des Clans, who took a leap of faith from Bordeaux to Provence and turned low-status wines into sought-after treasures. It's like the ultimate underdog story, complete with passion, grit, and a sprinkle of magic. So, pour yourself a glass and join us as we uncork the fascinating journey of rosé, and discover why this category is here to stay, bringing a whole new world of flavors to our tables!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The podcast dives into the transformation of rosé wine from a misunderstood beverage to a respected category, showcasing its Cinderella story. Rasmus and his guest explore the passionate dedication of producers, who are committed to elevating the quality of rosé and redefining its reputation. We learn that rosé wine has grown into a significant player in the wine world, with impressive sales and a growing presence on shelves and restaurant menus. The conversation highlights the importance of terroir and grape variety in understanding the nuances of rosé, making it a worthy wine experience. Listeners will discover the role of visionary winemakers, like Lucien from Provence, who transformed perceptions and produced high-quality rosé with flair. The episode reflects on the cultural shift in wine preferences, emphasizing how rosé is now celebrated for its diversity and unique flavors, not just as a summer drink.

Get ready to dive into the wild world of wine with Forrest Kelly and Jake Kloberdanz, the mastermind behind One Hope Wine. This episode kicks off with the jaw-dropping tale of how a wine company blossomed from a public storage unit and a trusty U-Haul, proving that passion can turn a dream into a reality. Jake spills the beans on his journey, from hustling in grocery store backrooms to crafting exquisite wines in the heart of Napa Valley. We chat about the heart of One Hope—where every bottle isn’t just about swigging fine wine but also about pouring hope into communities, one sip at a time. So grab your glass and settle in as we uncork some serious inspiration and a sprinkle of humor along the way!Please Follow Us on Social Media: www.instagram.com/thebestwinepodwww.facebook.com/thebestwinepod www.x.com/thebestwinepodwww.tiktok.com/thebestwinepodYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Rasmus Emborg and Forrest Kelly dive into the delightful world of rosé wine, revealing how this often-overlooked beverage has blossomed into a legitimate star in the wine scene. We chat about Rasmus's adventurous journey to buying a vineyard in southern France, fueled by a love for both wine and design—yes, that's right, his wife’s keen eye for decor turned their property into a stunning retreat. Throughout our conversation, we uncover the surprising complexities of rosé, from its trendy reputation to its rich, evolving flavors that make it worthy of your finest dining experience. Rasmus shares how he discovered that rosé is not just a poolside sip but a serious contender in the wine world, with producers around the globe crafting exquisite varieties. So, whether you're a rosé novice or a seasoned sipper, we promise you'll leave with a newfound appreciation for this pink delight and maybe even a little inspiration to pour yourself a glass—ice cubes optional!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Rasmus Emborg joins us to spill the tea—err, I mean, wine—on the evolving world of rosé in our latest chat. He's the mastermind behind the book "Revolution," which isn't just a catchy title, but a deep dive into why rosé deserves a seat at the big kids’ table of wine. We explore how Rasmus's journey from casual sipper to vineyard owner transformed his perspective on this refreshing varietal. Spoiler alert: it’s not just about sipping by the pool anymore; it’s an art form! So grab your favorite glass and get ready for some delightful musings and maybe a cheeky laugh or two as we toast to the vibrant world of rosé.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Rasmus Emborg, the mastermind behind the book "Revolution," takes us on a delightful journey through the world of rosé wine, transforming our perceptions of this often-misunderstood beverage. With a background steeped in journalism and a deep passion for food and drink, Rasmus shares how a spontaneous decision to buy a vineyard in Provence sparked his love affair with rosé. He dives into the artistry behind winemaking, introducing us to the intricate processes that elevate rosé to a status worthy of its own spotlight, right alongside the red and white heavyweights. The conversation flits between Rasmus's personal anecdotes—like the serendipitous moment he and his wife stumbled upon their vineyard—and the broader cultural shifts surrounding rosé, which has evolved from a poolside sipper to a serious contender in the wine world.As we sip along with Rasmus, it becomes clear that this isn't just about the wine; it's about the stories, the people behind it, and the dedication that goes into every glass. He shares insights into the various grape varieties that thrive in the sun-soaked vineyards of Provence, particularly Shiraz and Grenache, which are key players in the rosé game. Rasmus's enthusiasm is infectious, and he underscores how exploring different rosés has not only changed his palate but also deepened his appreciation for the craft. This episode is a celebration of not just a beverage, but a movement, as Rasmus advocates for rosé's rightful place on the wine list and in our hearts. By the end, listeners are left with an invigorated curiosity about rosé, inspired to venture beyond the traditional notions of wine pairing, and perhaps, to even seek out a bottle from Rasmus's own vineyard. It's a refreshing take on a classic drink that encourages us all to raise a glass and toast to the revolution of rosé wine.Takeaways: Rasmus Emborg's journey into the world of rosé wine began with a casual stroll that turned into an ownership of a vineyard, which is pretty wild! The collaborative process of writing his book Revolution involved adventures with a photographer friend, showcasing the artistry of rosé production worldwide. Rasmus shares a heartfelt connection to the vineyard, calling it one of the best decisions of his life alongside his family, which really shows his passion. Exploring different rosé varieties transformed Rasmus's...

Join Forrest Kelly as he dives into an engaging conversation with Jake Kloberdanz, the visionary behind One Hope Wine. They discuss the unique journey of creating a wine that embodies resilience and relentless spirit, aptly named "R and R." Jake shares insights into the winery's evolution from a referral-only experience to a public destination, emphasizing the exceptional food and wine pairing that awaits visitors. The architectural brilliance of the winery, designed by renowned architects, is highlighted, showcasing a blend of old-world charm and modern elegance. With a focus on community impact, this episode reveals how One Hope Wine not only delivers world-class wine but also contributes to meaningful causes, making every sip a part of something greater.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The winery has recently opened to the public, enhancing their exclusive wine experience. Their chef has an impressive background, having worked with renowned chefs like Morimoto. The architectural design combines the expertise of multiple talented architects for a unique experience. The property is designed to evoke a sense of magic and beauty in every corner. Wine tasting at the winery includes special dinners with influential thinkers around the table. The concept of the 'R and R' wine embodies resilience and relentless pursuit in winemaking. Links referenced in this episode:onehopewine.comCompanies mentioned in this episode: One Hope Four Seasons Restoration Hardware

Join us as we dive into a conversation with Jake Kloberdanz, the visionary behind OneHope Wine, where 10% of every purchase goes to a charity of the buyer's choice. Discover how OneHope has integrated philanthropy into the wine industry, allowing customers to support causes that matter to them while enjoying their favorite wines. Jake shares insights into their innovative software that tracks donations and the impact they've made, including generating millions of meals for those in need. We also explore the exciting growth of OneHope Wine, from hosting events nationwide to expanding into international markets like Korea and Japan. Get ready for a lively discussion that highlights the intersection of business and social good, all while raising a glass to a brighter future.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: OneHopeWine.com allows customers to choose their charity and donate 10% of purchases. The company has generated over three and a half million meals through wine sales. They provide a unique opportunity for hosts to raise funds with wine tasting events. OneHope's foundation focuses on education, clean water, and breaking the cycle of poverty. The business model integrates charity directly into the purchasing process for wine. OneHopeWine is expanding internationally, with plans for future growth in European markets. Links referenced in this episode:OneHopeWine.com

Join Forrest Kelly and Jake as they dive into the inspiring journey of One Hope Winery, a brand that merges the concepts of hope and wine to create a unique impact. The conversation highlights how the founders view their product not just as a beverage, but as a vessel for spreading hope and fostering community connections. Jake shares personal anecdotes about his entrepreneurial roots, tracing back to his family’s history and the values instilled by his grandmother and mother. As they explore the evolution of One Hope from a singular idea to a multifaceted brand, the discussion emphasizes the importance of maintaining a hunger for growth and innovation in the wine industry. Listeners will be captivated by the vision of building a wine brand that is iconic and deeply impactful for this generation and beyond.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Companies mentioned in this episode: One Hope Winery Stater Brothers University of Arizona Chico State Bay Area Silicon Valley Stanford Berkeley

Join us as we explore the world of fine wines with Jake Kloberdanz, founder and CEO of ONE HOPE Wine. This episode dives into the unique positioning of ONE HOPE in Napa Valley, where they not only craft exceptional wines but also contribute to meaningful causes with each bottle sold. Jake shares insights into the artistry of winemaking, emphasizing the importance of terroir and the community surrounding Napa's iconic vineyards. He discusses the delicate balance between price, perceived value, and true quality, revealing how a wine's context can enhance its enjoyment. With a passion for excellence and a commitment to giving back, Jake inspires listeners to appreciate wine not just as a beverage but as a vehicle for positive change.Join Forrest Kelly and Jake Kloberdanz, the founder and CEO of ONE HOPE Wine as they delve into the vibrant world of One Hope Wine. The conversation takes a deep dive into the importance of terroir, with a particular focus on Rutherford, where some of the most iconic wineries reside. Listeners will discover the nuances of wine tasting, from developing a refined palate to understanding the impact of price on perceived quality.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The Napa Valley has a unique terroir, contributing to the exceptional quality of its wines. Wines should be evaluated not only for taste but also for their price relative to quality. A wine's perceived value can significantly impact how it's experienced by consumers. The mid palate experience is crucial in wine tasting and develops with experience over time. Building brand equity and packaging are essential aspects of wine marketing and sales. Tasting wine in a well-crafted environment enhances the overall experience and enjoyment. Companies mentioned in this episode: Camus Robert Mondavi Takeaways: The Napa Valley is home to some of the most iconic wine brands, including those in the Rutherford region. Wine tasting involves not just the palate but also the aroma, which informs taste significantly. Perceived value and pricing can greatly influence how wine is perceived by consumers. Exceptional wines often come from small production, which can justify higher price points. The environment in which wine is consumed can enhance the overall tasting experience. Building a strong brand and packaging is crucial in the competitive wine industry. Companies mentioned in this episode: Camus Cake Bread Katakolon Vineyard Robert Mondavi ONE HOPE Wine

Join Jake Kloberdanz, the founder and CEO of ONE HOPE Wine, as he shares the inspiring journey of building a wine company from the ground up, starting in a public storage unit and a U-Haul truck. With a passion for wine and a mission to create a community-centric business, Jake reveals how personal challenges, including a close friend's cancer diagnosis, sparked his entrepreneurial spirit and led to the creation of a brand that stands for more than just wine—it's about hope and giving back. He discusses the hurdles of sourcing grapes and establishing a brand in a highly competitive market, emphasizing the importance of trust and community support. Throughout the conversation, listeners will gain insights into the challenges and triumphs of launching a wine company in Napa Valley's regulated environment. This episode is not just about wine; it's a testament to resilience, innovation, and the power of collaboration in pursuing one's dreams.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Jake Kloberdanz's entrepreneurial journey began after college, fueled by early experiences in the wine industry. The inspiration for ONE HOPE Wine came from a friend's battle with cancer, igniting passion and purpose. Starting from a public storage unit, Kloberdanz built a successful wine brand with community support. Kloberdanz emphasizes the importance of community ownership in the Napa wine industry. Building trust and brand recognition in the wine space is a challenging yet rewarding journey. The Napa Valley community played a crucial role in supporting Kloberdanz's innovative vision for ONE HOPE Wine.

Forrest Kelly and Doug Vincent speak with Jennie Murphy, owner and winemaker of Oxlee Graham Wines, for an engaging conversation about the intricate world of winemaking. Jennie shares her unique journey from aspiring forensic scientists to crafting exquisite wines, highlighting the delicate balance of science and creativity that defines her approach. With a background in chemistry, she emphasizes the importance of understanding the chemistry of wine while also embracing the artistic aspects of winemaking. Throughout the episode, listeners discover how Jennie wines reflect authentic stories and distinct personalities, showcasing varietals that may not be familiar to everyone. The trio dives into the challenges of the wine industry, the significance of family support, and the joy of creating unique wines that surprise and delight.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The importance of chemistry in winemaking is highlighted, especially in creating consistent flavors. Jennie Murphy emphasizes the unique identities of her wines, each with its own personality. Oxlee Graham Wines aims for elegance and authenticity, focusing on lower alcohol and fruit-forward profiles. The winery's name honors the strong women in Murphy's life, reflecting her values and inspiration. Links referenced in this episode:walkandrolllive.comOG Oxlee Graham Wines | Boutique WineryCompanies mentioned in this episode: Corbel Champagne Paul Hobbes Wines Alder Springs Vineyard Gaps View Tenuda Ridge McCoy Vineyard Galley Vineyard

Join Forrest Kelly & Doug Vincent on the Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast as they chat with Jennie Murphy, the owner and winemaker of Oxlee Graham Wines. Jenny shares her journey in the wine industry, highlighting her commitment to crafting unique wines inspired by the women in her life, particularly her flagship Dale's Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. As a new player in the market, she discusses her efforts to engage with the community through various events and tastings, and her plans to move into a new space that will include a tasting room for direct interactions with wine lovers. Listeners will also learn about her dedication to hands-on winemaking and the importance of access to her wines. Jennie's passion for her craft shines through as she invites everyone to explore her wines, emphasizing that each bottle tells a story and celebrates female inspiration in the winemaking world.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Jennie Murphy emphasizes the importance of hosting events to engage with wine enthusiasts. The Dale's Pinot Noir is Jennie's signature wine, inspired by her mother. Jenny discusses her transition to a new space for better wine production access. Upcoming events include collaborations with local wine shops and anniversary celebrations. Oxlee Graham Wines aims to expand distribution beyond Northern California to Southern California. Jenny highlights her hands-on approach to winemaking, performing all her own analyses. Links referenced in this episode:oxleegrahamwines.comCompanies mentioned in this episode: Oxlee Graham Wines Paul Hobbs

Join us for a delightful conversation with Jennie Murphy, the creative winemaker behind Oxlee Graham Wines, as she shares her unique approach to winemaking that beautifully blends science and artistry. Jennie discusses her journey from aspiring forensic scientist to a passionate wine producer, emphasizing the creative freedom of crafting wines that vary year by year, reflecting the distinct characteristics of each vintage. The episode also explores her vineyard partnerships in Sonoma County and Mendocino, highlighting her preference for family-owned operations that share her commitment to quality and sustainability. As Jennie reveals her favorite wine pairing for the podcast, listeners will discover her exquisite white blend, perfect for enjoying during a light-hearted discussion. Tune in for insights into the world of winemaking, where creativity thrives and every bottle tells a story.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Winemaking balances both creativity and scientific precision, fulfilling diverse personal passions for Jennie Murphy. Small wineries like Oxlee Graham allow for unique wine variations each year, enhancing creativity in winemaking. Jennie Murphy emphasizes the importance of working with family-owned vineyards for sustainable practices. Choosing cool climate and hillside vineyards leads to exceptional varietals like Pinot Noir and Albarino. Creative aspects of winemaking include marketing, unique labels, and developing exceptional wine blends. Alder Springs Vineyard's Chenin Blanc and Pic Pour Blanc make a perfect pairing for podcast enjoyment.

Join us as we dive into the world of winemaking with Forrest Kelly and special guest Doug Vincent. Jennie Murphy is the talented owner and winemaker of Oxlee Graham Wines. This episode highlights Jennie's journey from making award-winning wines at Paul Hobbs to crafting unique and elegant wines that tell authentic stories. She shares her experiences of creating a light, almost rosé-like Pinot Noir that surprised many with its complexity and depth. Jennie's passion for exploring diverse vineyards across Northern California shines through as she describes how each wine has its own identity, much like people. Tune in to discover what makes her wines distinctive, from the intriguing varietals to the personal touch she brings to every bottle.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Forrest Kelly discusses the transition from working at Paul Hobbs to creating unique wines. Jennie Murphy emphasizes the importance of elegance and freshness in her wine creations. The process of winemaking can surprise even experienced vintners with unexpected results. Murphy's goal is to produce wines that tell authentic stories and showcase individuality. The uniqueness of each wine reflects its origin, much like the personalities of people. Awards and high scores provide validation, but the true passion lies in creativity. Companies mentioned in this episode: Oxley Graham Wines Paul Hobbs

Join us for an inspiring conversation with Forrest Kelly as we delve into the journey of building a woman-owned and family-driven winery, Oxlee Graham. The episode highlights the significance of honoring family legacies, as the winery is named after Forest's grandmothers, who imparted invaluable lessons of strength, honesty, and hard work. Forest shares her wealth of experience, having worked for over a decade at Paul Hobbs, where she honed her winemaking skills and gained insights into the business side of the industry. Transitioning from employee to entrepreneur, she discusses the creative freedom that propelled her to establish her own brand, focusing on unique varietals and adventurous winemaking. This episode not only celebrates female empowerment in the wine industry but also underscores the importance of community support and familial bonds in achieving one's dreams.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The host emphasizes the importance of family support in running a woman-owned winery. Oxley Graham winery was named after the host's grandmothers, honoring their legacy and strength. After years of experience, the host transitioned from employee to entrepreneur in winemaking. The podcast highlights the creativity involved in winemaking and the freedom it offers. The host shares how personal experiences shaped the winery's identity and values. A focus on lesser-known varietals demonstrates the host's adventurous spirit in winemaking. Companies mentioned in this episode: Paul Hobbs

Join Forrest Kelly and his guest co-host Doug Vincent as they dive into the fascinating world of winemaking with Jennie Murphy, the owner and winemaker of Oxlee Graham Wines. Jennie shares her unique journey from aspiring forensic scientist to passionate winemaker, highlighting how her chemistry background plays a crucial role in her craft. Throughout the conversation, they explore the delicate balance between science and art in winemaking, discussing the importance of understanding chemistry to create distinctive wines while maintaining a natural approach. Jennie emphasizes the challenges faced by larger wineries that strive for consistency in their products, contrasting it with her more intuitive methods. Tune in for an engaging discussion filled with insights, humor, and a touch of adventure in the world of wine.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The winemaking process offers numerous opportunities for chemists to influence the final product. Natural winemaking techniques prioritize minimal intervention, focusing on the health of the ingredients. The importance of chemistry in winemaking varies between small artisanal and large commercial producers. Forrest emphasizes the significance of knowing the numbers to make informed winemaking decisions. The podcast illustrates how passion for the outdoors can lead to a fulfilling career. Links referenced in this episode:walkandrollive.comCompanies mentioned in this episode:Oxlee Graham Wines Korbel ChampagnePaul Hobbs wines

Damon Raque, founder of Bottle Bank, shares his journey of creating a unique wine-centric hospitality concept in Atlanta, where wine storage meets an inviting social atmosphere. The episode delves into the importance of adaptability in the wine business, echoing the sentiment that to thrive, one must listen to consumer needs and pivot accordingly. Rocky discusses his passion for wine, sparked by an unforgettable bottle that changed his perspective on what wine can be, and how this experience fueled his desire to connect wine lovers in a communal space. The conversation highlights the innovative design of Bottle Bank, aiming to foster a relaxed lounge environment rather than a traditional restaurant, encouraging guests to linger and engage with their shared passion for wine. Listeners will also gain insight into the operational challenges faced in establishing the concept, including securing a prime location and navigating the complexities of wine storage regulations.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Damon Raque passion for wine led to the creation of a unique wine-centric hospitality concept. Bottle Bank offers a space for wine enthusiasts to store, enjoy, and share their collections. The experience at Bottle Bank contrasts with traditional wine bars by emphasizing relaxation and community. Damon's journey into the wine industry was sparked by a memorable bottle that changed his perspective. The importance of providing a controlled environment for wine storage cannot be overstated for enthusiasts. Bottle Bank aims to cater to a diverse clientele, from casual drinkers to serious collectors. Links referenced in this episode:bottlebank.comCompanies mentioned in this episode: Bottle Bank Vint

Damon Raque from BottleBank.com shares the intricate journey of establishing a unique wine vault concept, revealing the numerous challenges faced along the way. From selecting the perfect location to navigating complex regulations, Damon highlights the unexpected hurdles that arise in the liquor industry, emphasizing the importance of structural integrity in their wine storage solution. The conversation dives deep into the meticulous planning required to comply with various zoning laws and liquor licenses, illustrating that each municipality presents its own set of obstacles. With a blend of humor and insight, Damon discusses innovative solutions like carbon fiber wraps to reinforce floors, showcasing the creative problem-solving essential in entrepreneurship. As he reflects on the journey, he invites listeners to envision a vibrant community experience at Bottle Bank, promising that every visit will leave customers with unforgettable memories.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Damon Raque discusses the significant challenges faced in finding the right space for BottleBank.com. The process of negotiating with landlords and ensuring a good economic deal can be exhausting. Understanding different liquor licenses and zoning requirements is crucial for establishing a wine business. Structural integrity of the floor was unexpectedly critical, requiring involvement from engineers. The journey of starting a business involves navigating countless obstacles and adapting creatively. The excitement of creating experiences for customers is at the heart of BottleBank's mission. Companies mentioned in this episode: BottleBank.com Links referenced in this episode:BottleBank.com

Join Forrest Kelly as he dives into the transformative power of wine in this engaging episode of the Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. The conversation unfolds around a pivotal moment in Damon Raque life, sparked by a remarkable bottle of 2006 Gemstone wine, which ignited a passion for the world of wine and its intricate flavors. Listeners will hear about a memorable evening filled with spontaneity, camaraderie, and the unexpected delight of discovering exquisite wines, leading to a deeper appreciation for the craft. The episode also touches on the exciting future of Bottle Bank, including exclusive member experiences and a focus on sophisticated wine events. With witty banter and insightful anecdotes, this episode encapsulates the joy of wine culture and the connections it fosters.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Links referenced in this episode:bottlebank.com

Damon Raque, co-founder of Bottle Bank, shares his vision for a unique wine experience in midtown Atlanta, emphasizing the establishment's blend of culture, community, and fine wines. Located in a vibrant area known for its artistic flair and walkability, Bottle Bank aims to create a space where wine enthusiasts can enjoy a curated selection of wines by the glass and bottle, alongside gourmet cheeses and charcuterie. Rich, Damon’s long-time friend and business partner, brings his entrepreneurial spirit and creative energy to the venture, enhancing its potential for success. The episode delves into the membership structure, featuring a $2,500 annual fee that includes access to exclusive lounges and private tasting experiences. With a focus on community engagement and enhancing the wine-drinking experience, Bottle Bank promises to be a destination for both casual sippers and serious connoisseurs alike.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Links referenced in this episode:bottlebank.com

Discover the art of wine storage and the unique experiences offered by BottleBank.com in this engaging podcast episode featuring co-founder Damon Raque. He emphasizes the significance of maintaining a controlled environment for wine, underscoring the ideal conditions of 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 70% humidity to preserve its integrity. Listeners are treated to a glimpse of the diverse clientele that Bottle Bank aims to serve, from casual enthusiasts seeking a vibrant space to serious collectors desiring a sophisticated environment for tastings and private dining. Damon shares enticing scenarios, such as crafting a personalized six-course meal paired with cherished wines for special occasions like milestone birthdays. With a focus on elevating the wine experience, the episode also touches on the importance of an appropriate dress code to enhance the ambience and overall enjoyment of the venue.Damon Raque, founder and managing partner at Bottle Bank in Atlanta, shares his journey into the world of wine and the creation of a unique wine-centric hospitality concept. Recognizing a gap in the market for wine storage and community, he emphasizes the importance of adaptability in business, drawing parallels to the evolving demands of consumers. Rocke's passion for wine and the experiences it fosters inspired him to design a space where wine lovers can gather, relax, and enjoy their collections together, moving away from traditional transactional models. Instead of a typical restaurant or wine bar, Bottle Bank offers a lounge-like atmosphere that invites patrons to linger and socialize over their favorite bottles. Through engaging storytelling and insights, this episode highlights how Rocke turned his personal passion into a thriving business that caters to the desires of modern wine enthusiasts.In this engaging episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, Forrest Kelly sits down with Damon Raque, the founder and managing partner of Bottle Bank in Atlanta, Georgia. Damon shares his journey from being a passionate Wine collector to creating a unique Wine-centric hospitality concept. Discover how a lunch conversation with a sommelier friend sparked the idea for Bottle Bank, a place where Wine lovers can store, share, and enjoy their collections in a relaxed, lounge-style environment.Damon explains the philosophy behind Bottle Bank, emphasizing the importance of adaptability in business and the need to provide experiences that cater to the desires of modern consumers. Unlike traditional Wine bars or restaurants focused on volume and transactions, Bottle Bank offers a living room-like setting where guests are encouraged to stay, relax, and connect over their shared love for Wine.Please tune in to learn about the innovative approach that sets Bottle Bank apart and how it fosters a sense of community among Wine enthusiasts. Whether you're a seasoned collector or just starting your Wine journey, this episode will inspire and delight you.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and <a href="https://wine.feedspot.com/wine_podcasts/" rel="noopener...

Bottle Bank is revolutionizing wine storage by offering a modern, secure, and climate-controlled solution that goes beyond traditional cellars. Co-founder Damon Raque shares insights into how this innovative approach not only caters to wine collectors but also fosters a vibrant community around wine appreciation. The facility will feature private wine vaults, a lounge, tasting rooms, and various amenities designed to enhance the wine experience. Damon discusses his journey from a focus on utilitarian wine storage to a hospitality-driven concept, emphasizing the importance of creating an inviting atmosphere for members. With a commitment to inclusivity, Bottle Bank aims to appeal to a diverse audience, making wine enjoyment accessible and enjoyable for everyone.Damon Raque, co-founder of Bottle Bank, shares his vision for a unique wine experience in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. The podcast delves into the concept of Bottle Bank, which aims to provide an extensive selection of wines by the glass and bottle, paired with gourmet cheeses, charcuterie, and desserts. Raque describes the vibrant, walkable neighborhood that will host their establishment, highlighting its cultural significance and artistic flair. He also discusses the collaborative partnership with his long-time friend Rich, emphasizing how their complementary skills have shaped the business's development. With an annual membership model in place, Bottle Bank promises to offer an exclusive yet accessible environment for wine enthusiasts to enjoy curated experiences and private events.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The discussion highlights the unique concept of Bottle Bank, a wine-oriented space in midtown Atlanta. Damon Raque emphasizes midtown Atlanta's vibrant, artistic nature as the ideal location. Membership will include access to a members-only lounge and various tasting experiences. Bottle Bank aims to enhance the wine-drinking experience with curated food pairings and events. The $2,500 annual membership includes exclusive amenities, making it a distinctive offering for wine enthusiasts. Links referenced in this episode:bottlebank.comLinks referenced in this episode:bottlebank.comCompanies mentioned in this episode: Vint.Co BottleBank.com

Bottle Bank is a groundbreaking wine-centric hospitality concept that redefines how enthusiasts engage with wine. Founder Damon Raque shares his journey from wine collector to entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of adapting to consumer needs in a rapidly changing market. With a focus on creating community and connectivity, Bottle Bank offers a unique environment where patrons can not only store their wines but also enjoy them in a relaxed lounge setting, prioritizing experience over transactions. Damon elaborates on the inspiration behind Bottle Bank, highlighting the surprising demand for wine storage even among homeowners, and the realization that wine lovers crave more than just a place to keep their bottles. This episode delves into the innovative approach of fostering a social atmosphere around wine, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of wine culture.Damon Raque, co-founder of Bottle Bank, introduces a revolutionary concept in wine storage that blends modern amenities with a community-focused hospitality experience. Traditional wine storage often lacks engagement and social interaction. Still, Bottle Bank transforms this by offering climate-controlled vaults alongside tasting rooms and lounges where wine enthusiasts can gather and enjoy their collections. Throughout the conversation, Damon shares his journey from initial ideas centered solely on wine storage to creating a vibrant wine community that prioritizes experience and connection. The facility will feature private wine vaults for members, allowing them to store and enjoy wines from anywhere. Listeners will discover how Bottle Bank is redefining wine storage and community, making it appealing to a diverse range of wine lovers.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Links referenced in this episode:bottlebank.comCompanies mentioned in this episode: Vint.coTakeaways: Damon Raque created Bottle Bank to combine his passion for wine with hospitality. The wine industry is evolving, requiring businesses to adapt quickly to consumer demands. Bottle Bank offers a unique environment for wine lovers to connect and share experiences. Unlike traditional restaurants, Bottle Bank focuses on creating a relaxing lounge atmosphere. Damon's journey into the wine storage business stemmed from his own collection challenges. The concept of Bottle Bank revolves around enjoying wine in a community-focused setting. Companies mentioned in this episode: Bottle Bank

Join us as we explore the evolving landscape of the wine industry with Laura DePasquale, Senior Vice President of Artisanal Wines at Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits. Laura shares her unique journey from aspiring artist to a trailblazer in the wine business, emphasizing the significance of women in leadership roles and how they are reshaping the market. She discusses the challenges she faced as one of the few women executives in her early career and highlights the progress made in recent years. The conversation delves into the importance of storytelling in wine marketing, particularly for small boutique wineries, and how these narratives enhance the customer experience. Laura also reflects on the agricultural essence of wine production and its vital role in shaping sustainable practices within the industry.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Laura DePasquale's journey from aspiring artist to master sommelier showcases the unexpected paths in careers. Women have made significant strides in the wine industry, paving the way for future generations. Storytelling is important in wine marketing as it enhances customer experiences and brand connection. Defining fine wine goes beyond price; it involves understanding production and availability nuances. Southern Glazer's commitment to sustainability and supporting artisanal wineries is commendable and impactful. Building mentorship programs for women in wine helps create a more inclusive industry environment. Links referenced in this episode:southernglaziers.com/careers

This episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast features a compelling discussion with Laura DePasquale, the Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations for Artisanal Wines at Southern Glaziers Wine and Spirits. A key takeaway is the recognition that wine is not just a beverage but an agricultural product that relies heavily on responsible farming practices, especially within artisanal and fine wineries. Laura emphasizes the importance of responding to consumer preferences, showcasing how the industry adapts to what wine lovers are seeking, particularly in popular varietals like Pinot Noir. Additionally, she sheds light on the industry's evolution toward inclusivity, revealing a significant shift from its historically biased perspective. As the conversation unfolds, listeners are encouraged to explore career opportunities within this dynamic field, highlighting the potential for growth and innovation in the wine and spirits sector.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: The wine industry is fundamentally an agricultural sector, focusing heavily on sustainable farming practices. Consumer preferences significantly shape the wine business, driving trends like the popularity of Pinot Noir. A wealth of job opportunities exists in the wine industry, often in family-owned businesses. The wine industry has made strides in gender equality, removing its historically sexist biases. Artisanal wineries prioritize environmental sustainability, contributing positively to the ecosystem through responsible farming. The industry is dynamic, with constant evolution and new career paths for innovative and talented individuals. Links referenced in this episode:southernazglazers.com/careers

Takeaways: The growing involvement of women in the wine industry has significantly shifted marketing strategies. As the primary consumers of wine, women influence how products are presented and sold. The storytelling aspect of wine enhances the customer experience and creates deeper connections. Social interactions around wine consumption have become increasingly important in today's society. Technology has changed how accounts order wine, but tasting remains an irreplaceable experience. Post-COVID, restaurants face higher challenges, making unique, artisanal offerings more valuable. Companies mentioned in this episode: Southern Glazer Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Laura DePasquale from Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits delves into transformative mentorship programs to empower women entering traditionally male-dominated sectors like supply chain and logistics. She highlights the importance of these initiatives in providing tailored guidance, ensuring women in the wine business receive the support needed to thrive. Laura shares her journey, noting the gratifying shift from being the only woman in the room to seeing women in leadership roles, including her boss, Cindy Leonard, the Executive Vice President of Wine. She also discusses the Next Gen Leaders program, which offers recent graduates the opportunity to explore various career paths within the company, from marketing to logistics. Laura emphasizes the importance of embracing passion in professional settings and encourages women to redefine their approach to being perceived as emotional, distinguishing it from genuine passion backed by facts.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Southern Glazer's offers multiple mentorship programs to support women entering the wine business. The company has leadership development programs for new, advanced, and senior leaders. Opportunities for women in leadership roles have significantly increased over the years. Passionate advocacy in professional settings should be balanced with factual backing. The Next Gen Leaders program helps recent graduates explore different career paths. Women should embrace their passion without fear of it being seen as emotional.

In this enlightening episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, host Forrest Kelly dives deep into the world of artisanal wines with Laura DePasquale, the Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations for Artisanal Wines at Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits. Discover the remarkable journey of Southern Glazer's, a family-owned company now in its third generation, and their immense contributions to the Wine industry and community.Laura shares her insights on the often-debated definition of fine Wine and how Southern Glazer's has taken a unique approach to categorizing wines. Learn about the distinctions between artisanal Wine, fine Wine, and commercial Wine, and how these categories are defined by production levels and market availability. Laura also discusses the challenges of scaling Wine production compared to spirits and the intricacies of Wine distribution across different global markets.With nearly 20 years as a Master Sommelier, Laura reflects on her continuous learning journey and the satisfaction she gets from bringing clarity to the Wine industry. Tune in for an episode filled with professional insights, industry challenges, and the passion that drives the world of artisanal wines.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In this episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, Forrest Kelly continues his engaging conversation with Laura DePasquale, a trailblazing Master Sommelier with two decades of experience. Laura opens up about the challenges and triumphs of being a woman in the Wine industry, particularly during her early years when she was often the only female executive in the room. Despite these obstacles, Laura's determination and passion for Wine have led her to break barriers and pave the way for future generations of women in the field.Laura shares a compelling story from her early career as a Florida state Italian Wine specialist, where she navigated the male-dominated landscape with resilience and ingenuity. Her journey to becoming a Master Sommelier, a title held by only 30 women worldwide, showcases her commitment and expertise. Laura's decision to become a pioneering figure in the industry has earned her multiple promotions and recognition as a groundbreaking leader.Laura also attributes much of her success to her upbringing and the invaluable mentorship she received throughout her career. Her current role at Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits allows her to support traditional and innovative wineries, ensuring their commercial success and sustainability. Tune in to hear more about Laura's inspiring journey and her vision for the future of the Wine industry.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In this riveting episode, Forrest Kelly welcomes Laura DePasquale, the Senior Vice President for Artisanal Wines at Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits and a Master Sommelier. Laura shares her unexpected journey from aspiring artist to renowned sommelier, detailing how a chance encounter with the Court of Master Sommeliers ignited her passion for Wine. Discover how Laura's career evolved from working in top restaurants in New York and Miami to becoming a pivotal figure in the Wine distribution industry.Laura recounts her experiences of working at Norman's in Miami, her transition into the business side of Wine, and her role in establishing a boutique artisanal Wine division at Southern Glazer's. She also provides a layman's overview of Southern Glazer's, the largest distributor of wines and spirits in the world, highlighting its extensive reach across Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. Tune in for an inspiring story of passion, perseverance, and the fascinating world of artisanal wines.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Melanie, the winemaker at Cana Vineyards and Winery in Middleburg, Virginia, shares her inspiring journey from a physical therapist to a celebrated figure in the wine industry. Notably, she made history in 2022 by becoming the first woman to win the Governor's Cup in Virginia's modern wine competition, a significant achievement in a field traditionally dominated by men. Melanie discusses the challenges of winemaking in Virginia’s humid subtropical climate, highlighting the rigorous work involved in producing high-quality wines while contending with disease pressure and unpredictable weather. As she reflects on her passion for rosé and the unique character of her wines, listeners are invited to appreciate the artistry behind each bottle. The episode delves into Melanie's philosophy that wine should be accessible, emphasizing the importance of welcoming experiences for all visitors to the vineyard.Join us in this episode as we travel to Middleburg, Virginia, the nation's horse and hunt capital, and home to Cana Vineyards and Winery. Our guest, Melanie, the winemaker, Vineyard manager, and all-around cellar team, shares her unique journey from being a physical therapist to an accomplished winemaker. Discover the origins of Cana Vineyards, named after Cana of Galilee, and learn about Melanie's transition from healthcare to viticulture.Melanie recounts her early career in physical therapy, her growing passion for Wine, and the pivotal moments that led her to pursue winemaking full-time. With a production of 2,500 to 3,000 cases A Year, Melanie handles almost every aspect of the winemaking process herself, making her story both inspiring and educational for anyone interested in the Wine industry.Don't miss this captivating episode filled with personal anecdotes, professional insights, and a touch of humor.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Companies mentioned in this episode: Cana Vineyards and Winery Fresno State Greenstone Vineyards

Join us in the final part of our interview with Melanie from Cana Vineyards as we explore five of their best wines. First up, we dive into the 2022 Albarino, a Wine that holds a special place in Melanie's heart due to her decade-long relationship with Greenstone Vineyards. Discover the serendipitous beginnings of this Wine and its rise in the mid-Atlantic region.Next, we shift to the vibrant world of rosé. Melanie shares her passion for crafting high-quality rosés, starting with the Rosé of Merlot, which began in 2017. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of producing three distinct rosés, including the Rosé of Cabernet Sauvignon, and how these wines have become a cornerstone of Cana Vineyards.As we wrap up, Melanie reveals that rosé is currently their top seller, with Albarino quickly gaining recognition. Tune in to hear about the competitive nature of winemaking and the importance of time and experience in creating exceptional wines.Don't miss this episode filled with personal stories, professional insights, and a love for winemaking. For more information, visit Cana Vineyards and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In part 3 of our interview with Melanie, the talented winemaker at Cana Vineyards in Middleburg, Virginia, we delve into the stunning property and the award-winning wines that have put this Vineyard on the map. Melanie shares the serene beauty of the winery, from the original structure built in 2011 to the new pavilion with its retractable sides and cozy fireplace, perfect for year-round enjoyment.Discover the various tasting experiences offered, whether guided or self-led, and learn why visitors often spend hours, if not the entire day, enjoying the expansive lawn, picnic grounds, and family-friendly atmosphere.Melanie opens up about the immense satisfaction of winning awards, particularly for her cherished rosé wines. She recounts the excitement and anticipation leading up to her 2019 vintage wines' recognition at the Virginia Governor's Cup, including the prestigious Governor's Cup and a top twelve placement for her red blend, La Mariage. Melanie's heartfelt story of nurturing her estate-grown grapes from Vineyard to bottle is a testament to her dedication and passion for winemaking.Don't miss this inspiring episode that celebrates the art and hard work behind every bottle of Cana Vineyards Wine.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Forrest Kelly continues his captivating interview with Melanie, the trailblazing winemaker at Cana Vineyards in Middleburg, Virginia. Tune in as Melanie recounts her exhilarating journey to winning the 2022 Governor's Cup, a prestigious award for Virginia-grown and made wines. Melanie made history as the first woman to win this competition in modern history, a milestone that underscores her disruptive yet inspiring presence in the industry.Melanie also shares insights into the unique challenges and rewards of running a woman-owned winery. Owned by Lisa Petty, Cana Vineyards prides itself on being a welcoming and accessible place where Wine lovers can feel at home, regardless of their Wine knowledge or attire. Melanie emphasizes that wine should be approachable and enjoyable for everyone, which aligns with her mission to demystify the wine experience.Discover the picturesque setting of Cana Vineyards, nestled in the heart of horse country, Virginia. Melanie paints a vivid picture of the 43-acre farmland, with seven and a half acres planted under vine on a beautiful south-facing hill. Learn about the Goldilocks climate of Middleburg, described as neither too hot nor too cold, and the humid subtropical conditions that present unique challenges for grape growers in the region.Join us for an episode filled with passion, perseverance, and a touch of humor as we explore the world of Virginia winemaking through Melanie's eyes.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In this effervescent episode, we dive into the sparkling world of sparkling wines with our bubbly connoisseur, Sour Grapes. Join us as we embark on a global tour of flavors, exploring the unique profiles of sparkling wines from Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and the United States.Discover the refreshing lime and tangerine notes of Germany's Sekt, the breakfast-inspired melon and toast flavors of Spain's Cava, and the crisp green apple and honey nuances of Italy's Prosecco. We also savor the elegant peach and strawberry notes of France's Champagne and the delightful almond and cherry hints in American sparkling wines.Whether you're a fan of dessert-like bubbles or breakfast-inspired fizz, this episode promises to add some sparkle to your Wine knowledge. So grab a glass and join us on this flavorful journey through the world of sparkling wines!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Join us in this episode as we travel to Middleburg, Virginia, the nation's horse and hunt capital, and home to Cana Vineyards and Winery. Our guest, Melanie, the winemaker, Vineyard manager, and all-around cellar team, shares her unique journey from being a physical therapist to an accomplished winemaker. Discover the origins of Cana Vineyards, named after Cana of Galilee, and learn about Melanie's transition from healthcare to viticulture.Melanie recounts her early career in physical therapy, her growing passion for Wine, and the pivotal moments that led her to pursue winemaking full-time. With a production of 2,500 to 3,000 cases a year, Melanie handles almost every aspect of the winemaking process herself, making her story both inspiring and educational for anyone interested in the Wine industry.Stay tuned for part two, where Melanie delves deeper into the sacrifices and rewards of following her passion, including taking a significant pay cut to achieve her dreams. Don't miss this captivating episode filled with personal anecdotes, professional insights, and a touch of humor.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

We've combined the entire Rimessa Roscioli interview into one bonus episode. Enjoy; you helped make them our biggest downloads.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.Takeaways: Lindsey Gabbard's journey from Michigan to Rome illustrates the transformative power of travel and passion for wine. Rimasa Riccioli blends traditional Italian cuisine with innovative wine pairings in a casual setting. Lindsey emphasizes the importance of storytelling in wine, bridging the gap between producers and consumers. The wine club offers 24 artisan wines annually, promoting small producers and unique experiences. Sustainability is a core value at Rimasa, including shipping wines on sailboats and using biodegradable packaging. Lindsey's initiative of QR codes on wine bottles enhances consumer engagement and education about wine origins. Links referenced in this episode:shop.rimessaroscioli.comrimessaroscioli.com/Companies mentioned in this episode: Rimessa Riccioli Riccioli Wine Club

In this episode, we wrap up our engaging conversation with Lindsay Gabbard, co-founder and sommelier of Rimessa Riscioli, as she shares the obstacles she's faced in the wine industry. From financial challenges to mastering the Italian language, Lindsay opens up about the hurdles she's overcome to build a successful wine club and restaurant in Italy.Discover how Lindsay's innovative idea of incorporating QR codes on wine bottles during COVID-19 has revolutionized the way customers access detailed information and videos about their wines. Learn about the collaborative dynamics of her team, blending American efficiency with Italian tradition, and the unique strengths each member brings to the table.Lindsay also introduces a new venture: Wine, Food, Art, and Culture tours in partnership with experts from various regions of Italy. These immersive tours offer a rich experience, combining visits to artisan producers with historical and cultural insights. With tours spanning from Piemonte to Sicily, these curated experiences are a must for any wine enthusiast.Stay connected with Rimessa Riscioli through their various platforms: Roscioli Wine Club for exclusive wine club details, Rimessa Riscioli for restaurant information, and their YouTube channel for enriching video content with English subtitles.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In this episode, we dive into the exciting expansion of Rimessa Roscioli to New York City. Our guest, Lindsay Gabbard, co-founder and sommelier, shares the details of their new location at 43 McDougall Street in Soho, designed to replicate the unique dining and wine pairing experience of their original Rome establishment. Discover the innovative sustainability initiatives that Rimessa Roscioli is pioneering, including the use of commercial sailboats to ship wine club boxes from Europe to Brooklyn, a first in 160 years. Learn about their patented biodegradable popcorn packaging, designed to protect wines during transit while being eco-friendly. Lindsay also discusses their efforts to save old vineyards and create immersive experiences for wine club members, including stays at vineyard properties and hands-on winemaking opportunities.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Join us as we explore the diverse and delightful world of Wine styles with our ever-pessimistic yet oddly charming co-host, Sour Grapes. In this episode, we break down the major types of Wine, from the unassuming Still Wine to the effervescent Sparkling Wine, and everything in between.Discover why Chardonnay is the vanilla ice cream of wines, how Rosé is perfect for those indecisive moments, and why Sparkling Wine is the life of the party. We also delve into the robust world of Fortified Wine, likening it to that overachiever friend who brings both a six-pack and tequila to brunch.Whether you're a fan of Still, Rosé, Sparkling, or Fortified Wine, there's something for everyone in this episode. And remember, if you're a grape, your future is pretty much squashed. Tune in for another round of grumpy wisdom from Sour Grapes, one vintage at a time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly! Today, we dive into the fascinating world of olive oil, and how it pairs perfectly with wine to elevate your culinary experiences. Did you know that some olive oils exported from Italy aren't even made from olives? Discover the surprising truth about olive oil production and how the Mafia has influenced this industry.At Rimessa Roscioli, our commitment to quality is unparalleled. We only work with small artisans and personally visit them to ensure the authenticity of their products. With over 600 videos of winemakers, cheese makers, and olive oil producers on our YouTube channel, we provide a transparent look into the origins of our offerings.Explore the diverse flavors of olive oil, from the lighter Tajasca olives in Liguria to the robust and spicy varieties from Puglia and Sicily. Learn why the best olive oils can make you cough and how this indicates high levels of healthy polyphenols.Interested in taking a piece of Italy home with you? At Rimessa Roscioli, nearly everything you taste is available for takeaway or shipping. With online shops and a new shipping hub in New York, US customers can receive their wines and foods much faster.Discover our exclusive Wine Club with four different levels, offering 24 wines per year from small producers across Italy. Each box includes a QR code for immersive stories behind the wines, making it a complete experience. Whether you're a casual drinker or a serious collector, our Wine Club brings the magic of Italian vineyards right to your doorstep.Join us for an episode filled with insights, practical advice, and a touch of humor as we explore the delightful synergy between wine and olive oil.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

We dive into the fascinating world of Wine grapes with our quirky and knowledgeable host, Sour Grapes. Learn about the unique characteristics that set Wine grapes apart from your everyday table grapes and discover just how many of these little beauties it takes to produce a single bottle of Wine. Join us for a quick yet informative journey through the Vineyard!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

In this episode, we dive into the vibrant world of Rimessa Roscioli's cooking classes and wine experiences with Lindsay Gabbard. Discover how Rimessa Roscioli offers an approachable and fun way for beginners to master the art of fresh handmade pasta, meatballs, and tiramisu, all paired with exquisite wines.Lindsay shares that 90% of participants in their cooking classes have never made pasta from scratch before. These classes are designed to be light, easy, and enjoyable, blending hands-on activities with demonstrations. After cooking, participants get to savor their creations alongside expertly paired wines with a sommelier.The daytime cooking class is one of Rimessa Roscioli’s most popular events, while the nighttime wine tasting dinner offers an equally engaging experience. For serious wine enthusiasts, the "Taste the Legends" tasting event provides an opportunity to sample 10-14 wines paired with different dishes, with varying levels of intensity and price points.Lindsay also discusses her personal wine preferences, highlighting a private label Cesanese from Lazio made in amphora, which has become her go-to bottle. However, she emphasizes the importance of continuously exploring new wines to avoid palate fatigue.Stay tuned for our next episode, where Lindsay reveals the surprising truth about olive oil production in Italy and the influence of the mafia. Plus, we celebrate a milestone as The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast cracks the top 200 podcasts, reaching position number 136!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts, Top 5 Minute Podcasts, and top wine podcasts.Takeaways: The cooking classes at Ramessa Rochelli are designed for beginners who enjoy fun cooking experiences. Participants often have little to no experience making homemade pasta prior to the class. Wine tasting dinners are one of the most significant experiences offered at Ramessa Rochelli. Different wine tasting menus range from $170 to $500, catering to various levels of wine enthusiasts. Lindsey Gabbard emphasizes the importance of keeping wine tasting accessible to everyone, regardless of expertise. Finding a favorite wine can be challenging for professionals who taste hundreds each year.

In this episode, Forrest Kelly and our resident wine curmudgeon, Sour Grapes, tackle the age-old question: What wine glass should you use? Sour Grapes breaks it down with his signature blend of grumpy wisdom and humor, making it simpler than you might think.Discover why different wines benefit from different glass shapes. Reds need big bowls to breathe, whites prefer smaller ones to stay cool, and sparkling wines thrive in tall, skinny glasses. And what about rosé? Sour Grapes calls it the wild child, suitable for either a white wine glass or a universal glass—just keep it clean!While having a specific glass for each type of wine is ideal, Sour Grapes reassures that in a pinch, even a mason jar can work. Wine is about enjoyment, not snobbery, after all. Plus, get a final tip on how to hold your glass by the stem to keep your wine cool and look like a pro.Join us for another episode filled with practical advice and laughs as Sour Grapes pours his wisdom, one vintage at a time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel, Top 5 Minute, and Top Wine Podcasts.

Join us as we continue our conversation with Lindsay Gabbard, co-founder and sommelier of Rimessa Riscioli in Rome, Italy. In this episode, Lindsay delves into the innovative use of QR codes on wine bottles, providing instant access to detailed information about the wine's origins, grape varieties, pairing suggestions, and more.Discover the behind-the-scenes efforts that go into creating these informative videos, as Lindsay shares how their production crew travels extensively to capture the essence of each wine. Learn about the unique Roscioli Wine Club Times, a collection of stories and experiences that go beyond the wine itself, reflecting the broader cultural and social aspects of their work.Get a taste of the culinary delights offered at Rimessa Riscioli, from traditional Roman dishes with a twist to collaborative dinners with guest chefs from various regions. Whether you opt for the à la carte menu or the wine-tasting dinner with six different wines paired with six exquisite plates, there's something to tantalize every palate.In addition to the restaurant experience, Lindsay introduces the Roscioli Food Tour, a daytime adventure that explores the different facets of the Roscioli universe. Starting with espresso and maritozzo at Roscioli Cafe, the tour includes stops at the bakery for pizza al taglio, a cooking demonstration, and a wine-tasting lunch at Rimessa Riscioli, culminating in a delightful tiramisu.Exciting news awaits as Lindsay reveals plans to open a fifth location dedicated to wine-tasting dinners, cooking classes, and olive oil tastings, along with a new performance space that will host music and other events.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.Takeaways: The integration of QR codes on wine bottles provides consumers with immediate access to detailed information about the wine they are enjoying. Wine tasting dinners feature expertly paired wines with six distinct courses, showcasing the culinary creativity of the restaurant. The  Rimessa Roscioli food tour offers an immersive experience through various culinary spaces, including espresso, pizza, and pasta demonstrations. The casual atmosphere of the restaurant encourages guests to relax and enjoy wine as an everyday experience, akin to water on the table. Collaboration with other chefs allows for innovative dishes that maintain the essence of traditional Italian cuisine while introducing new flavors. Future expansions of  Rimessa Roscioli include a venue for cooking classes and live music performances, enhancing the overall dining experience.

Welcome back to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly! In this episode, we continue our delightful exploration of Rome, Italy, home to a unique museum dedicated entirely to pasta. Join us as we step into the culinary wonderland of Rimessa Roscioli, a place where floor-to-ceiling shelves are brimming with an array of wines, foods, and gastronomic delights.Our guest, Lindsay, one of the co-founders, paints a vivid picture of the storefront, adorned not just with gourmet goodies but also with whimsical superhero paintings. She shares her daily routine, running wine and food tasting dinners, managing the Roscioli Wine Club, and traveling across Italy to discover new wines. Thanks to her innovative use of QR codes, every bottle in their wine club offers a virtual tour of its origins, making the wine-drinking experience both educational and enjoyable.We delve into the concept of natural wine, a term often debated but generally understood to mean wine made with minimal intervention. Lindsay prefers the term "artisanal wine," highlighting their selection of small producers who focus on quality over quantity. With around 60,000 bottles in their cellars, Rimessa Roscioli is a treasure trove for wine enthusiasts.Whether you're a seasoned oenophile or just curious about the world of wine, this episode offers a rich and engaging experience. Don't forget to like and follow The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast for more fascinating insights!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.Takeaways: The museum dedicated to pasta in Rome celebrates its rich history and variety. Dried pasta revolutionized storage and distribution, allowing it to be shipped worldwide. Rimasa focuses on artisanal wines from small producers, emphasizing quality over mass production. Natural wine is a term that lacks strict definition, but emphasizes minimal intervention in production. The use of QR codes on wine bottles connects consumers with the wine's origin and story. The concept of roscoelizing encapsulates the immersive experience of dining at their restaurant.

Welcome back to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast! Join Forrest Kelly and our resident wine curmudgeon, Sour Grapes, as they delve into the essentials of wine storage. Ever wondered how to store your wine properly? Sour Grapes has you covered with his signature blend of grumpy wisdom and humor.Discover why storing wine on its side is crucial for keeping the cork from drying out, and learn the best places in your home to store your precious bottles. Whether it's an unopened bottle or leftover wine, Sour Grapes explains the importance of maintaining a consistent, cooler environment—definitely not next to your oven!Get practical tips on how long you can keep wine once it's been opened. From sparkling wines to reds and whites, find out the optimal storage durations and methods to keep your wine fresh. Sour Grapes might joke about leftover wine being a foreign concept, but he knows exactly how to make sure your wine stays enjoyable for as long as possible.Join us for another episode filled with laughs, practical advice, and a touch of grumpiness as Sour Grapes pours his wisdom, one vintage at a time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts, Top 5 Minute Podcasts, and top wine podcasts.

Join Forrest Kelly as he continues his engaging conversation with Lindsay Gabbard, co-founder and sommelier of Rimessa Roscioli in Rome, Italy. In this episode, Lindsay shares the fascinating journey from Michigan to Rome, detailing how she and her partner transitioned from temporary tasting rooms to establishing a permanent, larger location in partnership with the Roscioli family.Discover the hidden gem of Rimessa Roscioli, tucked away near the iconic Campo di Fiori and Ponte Sisto. Lindsay provides a guide on how to find their renowned wine bar and tasting room, while also sharing insights into her ongoing journey of learning Italian.Explore the myriad of activities available at Rimessa Roscioli, from wine and food pairing dinners to cooking classes and private group events. Lindsay breaks down the expansive offerings, including their a la carte menu, extra virgin olive oil tastings, and the exclusive Roscioli Wine Club that delivers artisan wines from small producers to members in the US.Whether you're planning a visit to Rome or simply a wine enthusiast, this episode offers a rich and detailed look into the vibrant world of Rimessa Roscioli.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.Takeaways: Ramessa Roscioli shared her journey from the US to Italy, including her initial struggles. The wine bar in Rome offers a unique experience, combining tastings with culinary classes. Their business has evolved to include a diverse menu, catering to various customer preferences. The Richoli Wine Club allows members in the US to enjoy artisan wines from Italy. Ramessa emphasized the importance of learning Italian while living in Rome for better integration. The restaurant hosts numerous events, making it a hub for wine lovers and foodies.

Welcome back to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast! Forrest Kelly and our resident wine curmudgeon, Sour Grapes, are here to guide you through the delightful art of pairing wine with meals. Forget the old strict rules—it's all about enhancing your dining experience with these four simple guidelines.Guideline 1: Find the sweet spot. Ensure your dessert wine is sweeter than the dessert itself. Think sweet port with chocolate cake for a perfect match.Guideline 2: Opposites attract. Pair a crisp Riesling with spicy Thai dishes or champagne with French fries. The contrast can be surprisingly delightful.Guideline 3: What grows together goes together. Foods and wines from the same region often taste great together. Consider goat cheese with Sancerre or lamb with Pinot Noir.Guideline 4: Like goes with like. Match the intensity of the wine with the dish. A buttery Chardonnay complements a rich pasta sauce, while a bold Cabernet Sauvignon pairs perfectly with a juicy steak.Join us as Sour Grapes pours his grumpy wisdom, one vintage at a time, and even shares a little joke to keep things light. Why did the sommelier bring a bottle of Chardonnay to the seafood restaurant? Because he heard it was shrimp-ly the best match!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts, Top 5 Minute Podcasts, and top wine podcasts.

Welcome to another delightful episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly! Today, we’re taking you on an extraordinary journey to Rome, Italy, as we chat with Lindsay from Rimessa Riscioli and the Riscioli Wine Club. Discover the hidden gem Rimessa Riscioli, a restaurant, wine bar, and tasting room that captures the essence of the Italian experience.Learn about the fascinating origins of Rimessa Riscioli, which started as an illegal speakeasy in a warehouse, and how it evolved into a beloved wine destination. Lindsey shares her journey from growing up in Michigan to becoming a passionate wine enthusiast and sommelier. Hear about her adventures studying wine in London, traveling to Napa Valley and Santa Barbara, and eventually finding her place in Rome.Whether you're a seasoned wine lover or just beginning your oenological journey, this episode offers a captivating look at the world of wine through Lindsay's eyes. From her early wine experiences to her romantic escapades and professional growth, Lindsey’s story is a testament to the power of passion and perseverance.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.Takeaways: The concept of Remasa Riccioli was born from a storage space repurposed into a wine bar. Lindsey's early experiences with wine began in Michigan, where wine culture was limited. Traveling to Europe opened Lindsey's eyes to the diverse world of wine appreciation. The term 'vin de garage' refers to small, artisan wines made in garages. Lindsey's passion for wine deepened through personal experiences and professional training. The journey from a casual wine drinker to a knowledgeable sommelier can be challenging.

Welcome back to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast! Today, Forrest Kelly and our resident wine curmudgeon, Sour Grapes, guide you through the essential five steps of wine tasting, all while navigating the unexpected chaos of a bowling alley next to a wine cellar. Yes, you heard that right!Step 1: See. Hold your wine up to the light and take a good look. If you can't see through it, either it's a robust red wine or you forgot to remove the cap.Step 2: Swirl. Create a mini tornado in your glass, but be careful not to spill it on your date—unless you need a quick escape plan!Step 3: Sniff. Get your nose in there like you're identifying a mystery smell in your fridge. If you catch a whiff of wet dog, send it back. Otherwise, enjoy the delightful aromas.Step 4: Sip. Take a small sip and let it cover your tongue. Remember, it's a sip, not a gulp—we're tasting here, not playing a drinking game.Step 5: Savor. Let the wine linger like a great story. If the taste disappears faster than Sour Grapes' hairline, it might not be the best wine.Join us and elevate your wine-tasting game with these simple yet crucial steps. Remember, this is Sour Grapes pouring grumpy wisdom one vintage at a time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We close our conversation with Sonia Spadaro Mulone of Santa Maria La Nave boutique winery in Catania, Italy. Sonia shares the heartwarming story of her dedicated team, which includes skilled winemakers, passionate sommeliers, and even a family chef who uses ancient Sicilian grains to create delicious dishes. This episode offers a glimpse into the vibrant and familial atmosphere that defines Santa Maria La Nave in Catania, Italy.Sonia also discusses her two vineyards, one of which is located on the northwest side of Mount Etna at 1100 meters, offering breathtaking views and a rustic-tasting home. The other vineyard on the southeast side is home to an eco-friendly winery built amidst ancient lava flows. Sonia invites listeners to visit these unique locations, promising an unforgettable experience.The conversation also touches on the challenges Sonia faces, from extreme weather conditions to wildlife intrusions, and how she balances her business and private life. She reveals her plans to resurrect nearly extinct grape varieties, a project that has garnered support from local universities.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Ever wondered how grapes transform into the delightful elixir we call wine? Join Forrest Kelly and the ever-quirky Sour Grapes as they unravel the enchanting process of winemaking in this fun and informative episode. From the traditional foot-stomping of grapes to the magical fermentation process, discover the science, art, and a touch of humor that goes into every bottle of wine.Sour Grapes shares his secret ingredients for great wine—patience, love, and a bit of humor—while also giving a nod to the ancient roots of winemaking, dating back 8000 years. Whether you're a wine enthusiast or just curious about what makes your favorite vino so special, this episode is sure to leave you both educated and entertained.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We engage in a captivating conversation with Sophie Menin, co-author of the visually stunning and deeply insightful book, A Year in the Vineyard. Sophie shares her profound respect for wine growers, emphasizing the dedication, knowledge, and patience required to document their meticulous work. She highlights the collaborative process with her co-author, Bob Chaplin, an environmental artist and artisanal bookmaker, whose textured background paintings and visual storytelling elevate the book to an extraordinary level.Discover the beauty and complexity of wine production as Sophie explains the holistic approach wine growers take in the face of climate change. With quotes from notable figures like Richard Long and Richard Feynman, this episode delves into the deeper connections between wine, nature, and our world. Whether you're a wine enthusiast or simply curious about the art and science of winemaking, this episode offers a rich and enlightening experience.Get your copy of A Year in the Vineyard and embark on a sensual journey through the seasons of vineyards around the world.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Welcome back to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast! Today, we introduce our resident wine curmudgeon Sour Grapes and the ever-enthusiastic Forrest Kelly is here to set the record straight on the ideal serving temperatures for your favorite wines. Are you guilty of drinking white wine straight from the Arctic or red wine like it's a sauna? Fear not, we've got the perfect tips to elevate your wine game.White Wine: Take it out of the fridge 20 minutes before serving. It’s not meant to double as an ice pop!Red Wine: Give it a chill in the fridge for 20 minutes before serving. Room temperature is only good if you live in an igloo.Sparkling Wine: Serve it ice cold to keep those bubbles fine and dandy.Pinot Noir: Treat this diva right at 54 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.Cabernet Sauvignon: A bit warmer at 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, like a cozy hug for your taste buds.Oaked Chardonnay: The Goldilocks of wine temperatures, perfect at 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.Follow these tips to ensure you don't ruin your next bottle. Remember, this is Sour Grapes pouring grumpy wisdom one vintage at a time.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Join us as we continue our captivating conversation with Sophie Menin, co-author of "A Year in the Vineyard," a beautifully crafted book that takes readers on a tactile journey through the seasons of vineyard life. In this episode, Sophie delves into the intricate processes that vineyards undergo throughout the year—from the fragility of buds in spring to the protective measures taken during cold snaps in early summer. Discover how the dynamic relationship between vineyards and their surroundings is evolving, particularly in the face of climate change and the importance of biodiversity.Sophie shares some of her favorite images from the book, including the mesmerizing sight of smudge pots creating a blanket of warmth over vineyard floors and the intricate, croissant-like twists of vines during winter pruning. This episode is a feast for the senses, offering listeners a chance to explore vineyards in the Canary Islands, South Africa, Sicily, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Napa.Whether you're a seasoned wine enthusiast or new to the world of viticulture, this episode provides a rich, sensory experience that captures the essence of vineyard life and the ever-evolving art of winemaking.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Join us as we welcome Sophie Menin, co-author of the stunning new book, A Year in the Vineyard. In this episode, Sophie shares her journey from being a cultural reporter to becoming a wine writer, focusing on the intricate ways wine connects us to the earth, culture, and our senses. She delves into the inspiration behind her book, which highlights how wine growers are at the forefront of the climate crisis and explores potential remedies for our changing ecology. Discover the decade-long journey of creating a deeply visual narrative that intertwines art, nature, and the meticulous process of winemaking. Whether you’re a wine enthusiast or simply curious about the intersection of wine and the natural world, this episode offers a rich tapestry of insights and reflections.Get the book here.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Calmarossa Etna DOC is a red wine hailing from the slopes of Mount Etna, Sicily, Italy. The wine is named after the Calmarossa vineyard, which is situated on the northern side of Mount Etna. This wine is crafted predominantly from the Nerello Mascalese grape variety, which thrives in the volcanic soils of Mount Etna. Nerello Cappuccio and other indigenous grape varieties may also be blended in smaller proportions.Calmarossa Etna DOC Red wine is known for its elegant and complex character, often displaying aromas of red berries, dried herbs, floral notes, and earthy nuances. On the palate, it typically offers a combination of vibrant acidity, firm tannins, and a distinct minerality derived from the volcanic terroir. The wine can exhibit both finesse and intensity, with a long, lingering finish that showcases its aging potential.Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White Wine:Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White Wine originates from the island of Sicily, Italy, which is renowned for its rich viticultural heritage and diverse terroir. This wine is classified under the Sicilia DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) appellation, which ensures that it meets specific quality and production standards.Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White wine is crafted from a blend of indigenous white grape varieties that thrive in Sicily's Mediterranean climate. Varieties such as Grillo, Catarratto, Inzolia, and Carricante are commonly used in the production of this wine, each contributing its unique characteristics to the blend.This white wine is appreciated for its freshness, lively acidity, and aromatic complexity. It often exhibits citrus, tropical fruit, and floral notes on the nose, with a crisp and refreshing palate profile. Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White wine is versatile and pairs well with a variety of seafood dishes, salads, and light appetizers, making it a popular choice for both casual and fine dining occasions.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We close out our conversation with Linda King, the savvy globetrotter behind thesmarttravelista.com. Linda shares her journey from childhood adventures in Australia to becoming an expert in smart, cost-effective travel. As the conversation shifts to wine, Linda guides us through planning a visit to Australia's famed Barossa Valley, including a GAL Pal Getaway to reveal insider advice on budgeting, scheduling, and making the most of your winery experience. Whether you're a novice traveler or a seasoned wine enthusiast, this episode is packed with valuable insights to enhance your next wine-country adventure.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We continue talking with Sonia Spadaro Mulone, owner of the charming Santa Maria la Nave boutique winery in Catania, Italy, we delve into the heart of Mount Etna's viticulture. Sonia reveals her mission to preserve the ancient viticulture and native vines of the region, ensuring their legacy for future generations.Discover the meticulous process of resurrecting nearly extinct indigenous grape varieties, akin to unearthing treasures of the past, and the collaboration with local farmers and academia to protect these rarities. Sonia's passion for archaeology shines through as she likens her work to discovering Tutankhamun in the world of wine.Learn why Etna's vineyards, untouched by irrigation, yield full-bodied wines distinct in character, mirroring the organic and biodynamic ethos Sonia upholds. A testament to tradition, these wines are crafted without chemicals, staying true to the ancient methods taught by the venerable Don Alfio.From planting Grecanico Dorato grapes in 2004 to the momentous release of their first bottle, Sonia's journey is a testament to patience and dedication. Join us as we explore the unwavering commitment to authenticity that defines Santa Maria la Nave.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

In this special bonus episode we trade the vineyard for the open road as host Forrest Kelly sits down with Linda King, the savvy globetrotter behind thesmarttravelista.com. Linda shares her journey from childhood adventures in Australia to becoming an expert in smart, cost-effective travel. As the conversation shifts to wine, Linda guides us through planning a visit to Australia's famed Barossa Valley, including a GAL Pal Getaway to reveal insider advice on budgeting, scheduling, and making the most of your winery experience. Whether you're a novice traveler or a seasoned wine enthusiast, this episode is packed with valuable insights to enhance your next wine-country adventure.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

In part three of our enriching dialogue with Sonia Spadaro Mulone, owner of the charming Santa Maria la Nave boutique winery in Catania, Italy, we delve into the heart of Mount Etna's viticulture. Sonia reveals her mission to preserve the ancient viticulture and native vines of the region, ensuring their legacy for future generations.Discover the meticulous process of resurrecting nearly extinct indigenous grape varieties, akin to unearthing treasures of the past, and the collaboration with local farmers and academia to protect these rarities. Sonia's passion for archaeology shines through as she likens her work to discovering Tutankhamun in the world of wine.Learn why Etna's vineyards, untouched by irrigation, yield full-bodied wines distinct in character, mirroring the organic and biodynamic ethos Sonia upholds. A testament to tradition, these wines are crafted without chemicals, staying true to the ancient methods taught by the venerable Don Alfio.From planting Grecanico Dorato grapes in 2004 to the momentous release of their first bottle, Sonia's journey is a testament to patience and dedication. Join us as we explore the unwavering commitment to authenticity that defines Santa Maria la Nave.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

In this special bonus episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, we trade the vineyard for the open road as host Forrest Kelly sits down with Linda King, the savvy globetrotter behind thesmarttravelista.com. Linda shares her journey from childhood adventures in Australia to becoming an expert in smart, cost-effective travel.Discover how a youthful road trip ignited Linda's lifelong passion for exploration, and how her expertise in both the travel industry and finance led to the birth of The Smart Travelista. Linda's unique perspective blends wanderlust with wallet wisdom, offering listeners tips on how to travel well without breaking the bank.As the conversation shifts to wine, Linda guides us through planning a visit to Australia's famed Barossa Valley, including a GAL Pal Getaway to reveal insider advice on budgeting, scheduling, and making the most of your winery experience. Whether you're a novice traveler or a seasoned wine enthusiast, this episode is packed with valuable insights to enhance your next wine-country adventure.Join us for this delightful journey and don't forget to like and follow for more travel tales and wine wisdom with Forrest Kelly!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We embark on a journey to Catania, Italy, home to the picturesque Santa Maria la Nave boutique winery. Sonia Spadaro Mulone, the owner, shares insights into her winery and the fascinating story behind its inception.Sonia, a multilingual individual, offers a glimpse into her linguistic prowess and cultural background, setting the stage for an enriching conversation.We're introduced to Don Alfio, a revered figure in Sonia's life and the guardian of a special vineyard on Mount Etna. His wisdom and passion for viticulture leave a lasting impression, shaping Sonia's journey in the wine industry.As we delve deeper into Sonia's narrative, we uncover the unique biodiversity and geographical significance of Mount Etna, the highest active volcano in Europe, and it's surrounding areas.Calmarossa Etna DOC Red - Our Calmarossa is forged by centuries of Etna winemaking tradition, from which a strong and stubborn wine is born, but at the same time elegant, like the ancient plants from which it comes. Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White - Millesulmare is born from the splendid Grecanico Dorato vines of our Casa Decima vineyard, a wine with extraordinary minerality and elegant hints of mountain and sea. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

Search for an episode if you only remember a couple of words, our AI will do the rest. Thebestwinepodcast.com Also, in the bottom right corner of the website, you can leave a voicemail to win a free t-shirt. Check out our new merchandise section. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

In this episode, we embark on a journey to Catania, Italy, home to the picturesque Santa Maria la Nave boutique winery. Sonia Spadaro Mulone, the owner, shares insights into her winery and the fascinating story behind its inception.Sonia, a multilingual individual, offers a glimpse into her linguistic prowess and cultural background, setting the stage for an enriching conversation.We're introduced to Don Alfio, a revered figure in Sonia's life and the guardian of a special vineyard on Mount Etna. His wisdom and passion for viticulture leave a lasting impression, shaping Sonia's journey in the wine industry.As we delve deeper into Sonia's narrative, we uncover the unique biodiversity and geographical significance of Mount Etna, the highest active volcano in Europe, and it's surrounding areas. Calmarossa Etna DOC Red - Our Calmarossa is forged by centuries of Etna winemaking tradition, from which a strong and stubborn wine is born, but at the same time elegant, like the ancient plants from which it comes. Millesulmare Sicilia DOC White - Millesulmare is born from the splendid Grecanico Dorato vines of our Casa Decima vineyard, a wine with extraordinary minerality and elegant hints of mountain and sea. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We took the show on the road to the Brewabilites event in Chino Hills California at the Chino Hills Equestrian Center. It was a fundraiser geared towards raising money for Anthesis, where our guest host Doug Vincent is a board member and fellow podcaster of Walk and Roll Live. We spoke with Devon and Ginger of Joseph Filippi Winery & Vineyards who explained everything that the Winery has to offer including Taco Tuesdays and Food Truck Fridays. Filippi Winery is in the middle of Rancho Cucamonga California. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts and Top 5 Minute Podcasts.

We went a little long on our interview with Louis but we were having too much fun! Thanks to Louis for being a good sport. Also thanks to Doug for helping and you can hear more of Doug in his Disabilities podcast called Walk and Roll Live. https://www.walkandrolllive.com/podcasts.htmlYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We venture to Homer, Alaska the halibut capital of the world—home to over 5 thousand people and Bear Creek Winery. Let's meet Louis Maurer and Bear Creek Winery.Tasting Room -You will be guided through a tasting of up to 8 wines of your choosing from our expansive wine list by one of our knowledgeable staff. Tastings are available on a walk-in basis 7 days a week. Enjoy a self-guided tour through our botanical gardens showcasing the fruits and berries that we use in our winemaking. Our Private Tasting pampers you and your guests with one-on-one attention where your host guides you through a winemaking facilities tour followed by a curated wine-tasting experience with gourmet cheeses selected and paired by the head winemaker and a local certified cheese professional. Taste through 6 wines across multiple varietals and blends showcasing our expertise in fruit wine making. Winemaking Tours, Experience a guided tour of our winemaking facility explaining our history and unique style of winemaking. Private Events, Our botanical garden is available for private events. Also, enjoy the Art/Garden Tour and Wine Tasting. Visit the Dean Homestead and Art Studios for a guided, educational tour of their creative, homestead-inspired, Alaska lifestyle including unique architecture, gardens, and art studio. Follow it up by visiting the Bear Creek Tasting Room and Botanical Gardens for a wine tasting and a complimentary bottle of wine. Also, enjoy a self-guided tour of our Botanical Garden. award-winning selections: Alaskan Chardonnay - Strawberry Rhubarb -Inlet Sunrise - Black Raspberry - Alaskan Port - and Trinity Berry Blend.Do you feel like having wine and staying the weekend in their Luxury Suites? You can sign up to get DISCOUNT and WINE RELEASE notifications!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We venture to Homer, Alaska the halibut capital of the world—home to over 5 thousand people and Bear Creek Winery. Let's meet Louis Maurer and Bear Creek Winery.Tasting Room -You will be guided through a tasting of up to 8 wines of your choosing from our expansive wine list by one of our knowledgeable staff. Tastings are available on a walk-in basis 7 days a week. Enjoy a self-guided tour through our botanical gardens showcasing the fruits and berries that we use in our winemaking. Our Private Tasting pampers you and your guests with one-on-one attention where your host guides you through a winemaking facilities tour followed by a curated wine-tasting experience with gourmet cheeses selected and paired by the head winemaker and a local certified cheese professional. Taste through 6 wines across multiple varietals and blends showcasing our expertise in fruit wine making. Winemaking Tours, Experience a guided tour of our winemaking facility explaining our history and unique style of winemaking. Private Events, Our botanical garden is available for private events. Also, enjoy the Art/Garden Tour and Wine Tasting. Visit the Dean Homestead and Art Studios for a guided, educational tour of their creative, homestead-inspired, Alaska lifestyle including unique architecture, gardens, and art studio. Follow it up by visiting the Bear Creek Tasting Room and Botanical Gardens for a wine tasting and a complimentary bottle of wine. Also, enjoy a self-guided tour of our Botanical Garden. award-winning selections: Alaskan Chardonnay - Strawberry Rhubarb -Inlet Sunrise - Black Raspberry - Alaskan Port - and Trinity Berry Blend.Do you feel like having wine and staying the weekend in their Luxury Suites? You can sign up to get DISCOUNT and WINE RELEASE notifications!Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Garth Brooks to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We conclude our conversation with Lieven De Geyndt, founder of Sparkling Wine Club, Sparkle-ist.comWe speak with Lieven De Geyndt founder/owner of Sparkle-ist, not just another wine club. Their selections aren’t made with algorithms. They’re made with the same care their network of growers put inside every bottle.Champagne Club $109 Delivery every 1 Month Get the best in sparkling tailored from their unique access to artisanal sparkling wines. 3 Hand Selected Bottles Per Month Focus on Biodynamic and Minimal-Intervention Practices Skip your order, Swap, or Cancel at any time Clear notifications on deliveryTreat yourself to a Sparkle-ist Gift Card. Sparkle-ist Gift Box Treat someone special with Sparkle-ist Gift box. Amaze and impress that special person with a gift that is both memorable and fun. They will receive the same amazing box as our regular members. The pop of a bottle is a guaranteed way to put a smile on someone's face. We'll also add a personalized note on your behalf.Sparkle-ist Gift DetailsSparkle-ist Gift boxes, ship the 1st of the month, along with all members' boxes or special ship dates can be arranged by letting us know. Private & Corporate Tastings - Because Champagne makes everything better!Immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through the world of bubbles with our bespoke Champagne and sparkling wine tastings.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We continue to interview Lieven De Geyndt. What makes a great sparkling wine? Misconceptions, what are they associated with sparkling wine? We speak with Lieven De Geyndt founder/owner of Sparkle-ist, not just another wine club. Their selections aren’t made with algorithms. They’re made with the same care their network of growers put inside every bottle.Champagne Club $109 Delivery every 1 Month Get the best in sparkling tailored from their unique access to artisanal sparkling wines. 3 Hand Selected Bottles Per Month Focus on Biodynamic and Minimal-Intervention Practices Skip your order, Swap, or Cancel at any time Clear notifications on deliveryTreat yourself to a Sparkle-ist Gift Card. Sparkle-ist Gift Box Treat someone special with Sparkle-ist Gift box. Amaze and impress that special person with a gift that is both memorable and fun. They will receive the same amazing box as our regular members. The pop of a bottle is a guaranteed way to put a smile on someone's face. We'll also add a personalized note on your behalf.Sparkle-ist Gift DetailsSparkle-ist Gift boxes, ship the 1st of the month, along with all members' boxes or special ship dates can be arranged by letting us know. Private & Corporate Tastings - Because Champagne makes everything better!Immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through the world of bubbles with our bespoke Champagne and sparkling wine tastings.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

Hey Founder of Sparkle-ist, What makes your bubbles different, Lieven De Geyndt?We speak with Lieven De Geyndt founder/owner of Sparkle-ist, not just another wine club. Their selections aren’t made with algorithms. They’re made with the same care their network of growers put inside every bottle.Champagne Club $109 Delivery every 1 Month Get the best in sparkling tailored from their unique access to artisanal sparkling wines. 3 Hand Selected Bottles Per Month Focus on Biodynamic and Minimal-Intervention Practices Skip your order, Swap, or Cancel at any time Clear notifications on deliveryTreat yourself to a Sparkle-ist Gift Card. Sparkle-ist Gift Box Treat someone special with Sparkle-ist Gift box. Amaze and impress that special person with a gift that is both memorable and fun. They will receive the same amazing box as our regular members. The pop of a bottle is a guaranteed way to put a smile on someone's face. We'll also add a personalized note on your behalf.Sparkle-ist Gift DetailsSparkle-ist Gift boxes, ship the 1st of the month, along with all members' boxes or special ship dates can be arranged by letting us know. Private & Corporate Tastings - Because Champagne makes everything better!Immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through the world of bubbles with our bespoke Champagne and sparkling wine tastings.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We speak with Lieven De Geyndt founder/owner of Sparkle-ist, not just another wine club. Their selections aren’t made with algorithms. They’re made with the same care their network of growers put inside every bottle.Champagne Club $109 Delivery every 1 Month Get the best in sparkling tailored from their unique access to artisanal sparkling wines. 3 Hand Selected Bottles Per Month Focus on Biodynamic and Minimal-Intervention Practices Skip your order, Swap, or Cancel at any time Clear notifications on deliveryTreat yourself to a Sparkle-ist Gift Card. Sparkle-ist Gift Box Treat someone special with a Sparkle-ist Gift box. Amaze and impress that special person with a gift that is both memorable and fun. They will receive the same amazing box as our regular members. The pop of a bottle is a guaranteed way to put a smile on someone's face. We'll also add a personalized note on your behalf.Sparkle-ist Gift DetailsSparkle-ist Gift boxes, ship the 1st of the month, along with all members' boxes or special ship dates can be arranged by letting us know. Private & Corporate Tastings - Because Champagne makes everything better!Immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through the world of bubbles with our bespoke Champagne and sparkling wine tastings.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

We speak with Lieven De Geyndt founder/owner of Sparkle-ist, not just another wine club. Their selections aren’t made with algorithms. They’re made with the same care their network of growers put inside every bottle.Champagne Club $109 Delivery every 1 Month Get the best in sparkling tailored from their unique access to artisanal sparkling wines. 3 Hand Selected Bottles Per Month Focus on Biodynamic and Minimal-Intervention Practices Skip your order, Swap, or Cancel at any time Clear notifications on deliveryTreat yourself to a Sparkle-ist Gift Card. Sparkle-ist Gift Box Treat someone special with Sparkle-ist Gift box. Amaze and impress that special person with a gift that is both memorable and fun. They will receive the same amazing box as our regular members. The pop of a bottle is a guaranteed way to put a smile on someone's face. We'll also add a personalized note on your behalf.Sparkle-ist Gift DetailsSparkle-ist Gift boxes, ship the 1st of the month, along with all members' boxes or special ship dates can be arranged by letting us know. Private & Corporate Tastings - Because Champagne makes everything better!Immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through the world of bubbles with our bespoke Champagne and sparkling wine tastings.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted One of The Best Travel Podcasts

I’m the owner Frédéric Bouché and the winemaker of Ports of New York Winery. Welcome to Part 3 of our conversation with Frédéric Bouché. Can’t wait to get into it. So many fascinating stories with Mr. Bouche. Imagined having a winery with your style and the way that you’re so personable that you hear some interesting stories from your patrons had something to do.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is Ports of New York as we continue our conversation with Frédéric Bouché Ports of New York, owner-operator. And then what happened is that my wife and I moved to the Finger Lakes region in 1994 because she got a position at Cornell University. So it was kind of ironic after all the years that I was away from it, I fell back into it. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is, we travel to Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University, and also has the highest percentage of workers who walk to work. Seventeen percent of their workers walk to work. Also home to Alex Haley, the Roots author, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Lolita author, and most importantly, home to Frédéric Bouché, owner and winemaker of Ports of New York winery.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We conclude our conversation with Michelle Bredeson. Did you know they have a cave at Carlos Creek Winery? We also talk about how big the Wine Club is and why membership is capped.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson talks about live music and beer events. What is Carlos Creek Wineries' biggest selling wine? Let's find out.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson introduces us to Minnesota's Winery of the Year for 2021. Can't forget about the The Grape Stomp event.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson educates us on barrels and the expanse of Carlos Creek Winery.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Meet the owners of Carlos Creek Winery - Hi! We are Tyler and Michelle Bredeson - two people with a love for wine, family & fun! We have been working at the winery since 2008 as part of a family business with Tami and Kim Bredeson (Tyler’s parents)Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson is our guest. She is the Marketing Director and Co-Owner of Carlos Creek Winery.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We finished our last episode with Angela from Prairie Berry Winery talking about their wine club, and it's one of the biggest wine clubs in the United States. How big is it? So we have one of the largest wine clubs in the country. We have about 5000 wine club members from across the United States. We ship our wines four times a year to our members, and then they enjoy other benefits, such as event discounts and shipping perks, and our wine clubs called Gen Five. So it's a play on Generation Five, which, as I mentioned before, is the fifth-generation winemaker. I've never seen anything like it. When our guests come in this summer, and try our wines, most often, they live outside of the region. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is, we continue our conversation with Angela of Prairie Berry Winery in Hill City, South Dakota. So we’ve won over a thousand international awards for our wine. When I tell people that sometimes, you know, they look at our labels as very whimsical and attractive, people enjoy the artwork on our labels. Right. And so when I tell them about the awards that we won, for example, for our flagship wine Red Ass Rhubarb, they’ll say, oh, it’s the name, but wine competitions are blind. So the judges don’t know what they’re tasting, which speaks for itself. Okay. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about your most awarded wine and how you came about the name.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is: We venture to Hill City, South Dakota. The oldest existing city in Pennington County. A 15-minute mule ride from Mount Rushmore. And about 70 miles from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, which is the geographic center of the United States. Hi, this is Angela from Prairie Berry Winery. I am the director of sales and marketing. Hello, Angela. I’ve heard of a Rocky Mountain oyster, but what is a prairie berry? Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is we conclude our interview with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. As we've learned in past episodes from Stephen, it's all about making wine to its purest form, and that includes serving local and organic food in their restaurants. And what exactly does local and organic mean, and why is that so important?Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is where we continue our conversation with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in British Columbia, Canada.Well, we started out of our little garage making wine in 1990, and 91, and we introduced the same Strutt in December 91 to right in the beginning of 92 in New York City to great reviews there, as I mentioned. So the official opening is 92, but we've been making wine since the late 80s. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Our featured winery is; we continue our conversation with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery. I'm not asking for the secret sauce here. What do you feel attributes to all of the awards that you get for your winemaking?Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Let's get down to the wonderful story of Summerhill Pyramid Winery. Stephen, your accomplishments would fill a New York City phone book. But let's start back at the beginning. Where did all of this begin in connection with the Earth of the land and begin? It goes back to my childhood. I love growing things in the soil, being outdoors, and climbing trees a little. As a little boy, I've always been an outdoor kid, and I, you know, got involved in real estate development in a way that would save the wetlands and the steep slopes and very involved in early in the 60s, 60s hippie, if you will, out there protesting the way people built things. I was one of the founders of why environmental rules are so strict today, why they can't just fill in wetlands and stuff like that was my original push in New YorkYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We meet our guest, Vito Lerede, who is from a small town in the region of Puglia, Italy. He is the founder of Winecork.com. He wants to change the way you interact with wine. Let's hear how he's going to make that happen. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner (popular movie - . A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We meet our guest, Vito Lerede, who is from a small town in the region of Puglia, Italy. He is the founder of Winecork.com. He wants to change the way you interact with wine. Let's hear how he's going to make that happen. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner  A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We meet our guest, Vito Lerede, who is from a small town in the region of Puglia, Italy. He is the founder of Winecork.com. He wants to change the way you interact with wine. Let's hear how that's going to happen. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Matt Berson explains how putting a great wine in a can comes about. If you would love to visit Portland Wine Company, join their newsletter for updates about events, etc. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

Matt Berson explains the love of producing great wine. Do they have vineyards on the property at 3201 S. E. 50TH Ave, Portland, OR? What kind of atmosphere can you experience at Love & Squalor Wine? Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

We are talking with Matt Berson, Vintner and Winery Owner of Portland Wine Company home of Love & Squalor Wine.Transiting from the Restaurant business into a Winery owner has its challenges. What's it like to work at wineries around the world learning the ins and outs of making wine? Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

We venture to the 33rd state, Oregon, and speak with Matt Berson, Vintner and Winery Owner of Portland Wine Company home of Love & Squalor Wine. What is Portland Wine Company and who is Matt? Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

We conclude our conversation with the GM of Duchman Family Winery of Driftwood, Texas Tommy Wellford. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

GM Tommy Wellford of Duchman Family Winery reveals the details about HGTV honoring them and other awards. Also we talk about the Private Picnic Experience. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Gift The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast some love.

Tommy Wellford, GM of Duchman Family Winery gives us the details about the wine club. He also reinforces the family values with the winemaker, Dave Reilly.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

Tommy Wellford GM of Duchman Family Winery in Driftwood, Texas is our guest. Tasting options and Winery tours are almost endless. Thank you for your support The Best 5 Minute Wine PodcastYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Tommy Wellford GM of Duchman Family Winery in Driftwood, Texas is our guest. Where did he start working and how that led to his current role is what we discuss in this episode.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021Thank you for your support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

Welcome to the best five minute wine podcast, where we embark on an adventurous exploration of the diverse world of wines. This episode features a captivating discussion with a winery representative who shares insights about their unique offerings, including the state's only method champagne and a range of delightful fruit wines and meads. Notably, we delve into their famous "Roadkill Red," a semi-sweet Colorado red table wine that has captured the hearts of many wine enthusiasts. The conversation reveals the artisanal dedication behind the production of these wines, emphasizing the use of real fruit and the complexities of crafting fruit and mead wines compared to traditional grape wines. As we toast to the joys of wine, we also highlight the importance of enjoying the right wine for the right occasion, whether it be a relaxing hot tub moment or a gourmet seafood dinner.We close our conversation with Richard Turley of Colorado Cellars. Did you know ? They grow their own grapes and fruit, keep bees for honey wine, personally make and bottle their wines – even deliver it themselves. They are unique amongst Colorado wineries in that they are – and have always been – exclusively in the wine business… no second jobs, second incomes, or second careers. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Welp Magazine voted it as one of the best travel podcasts of 2021!Our new music bed is from David Maine. Who is David Maine? David Maine is an NYC-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is currently the in-house composer and sonic brander of The Gravel Institute. He operates out of his studio in Ridgewood NY. What can he provide you? Custom or Library compositions for all kinds of media and experiences, creative sound design, and sonic branding.Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Richard Turley of Colorado Cellars continues as our guest. What is a typical day like at Colorado Cellars?Brett from Lake Havasu, Arizona also calls the show and asks a wine question.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Welp Magazine voted it as one of the best travel podcasts of 2021!Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest is the co-owner of Colorado Cellars, Richard Turley. This winery gem is in Palisade, Colorado, known for its peach orchards and wine vineyards. The climate, a 182-day growing season, makes Palisade "The Peach Capital of Colorado".Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021We are happy to recommend The Lowe Down with Kevin Lowe Podcast

Our guest is the co-owner of Colorado Cellars, Richard Turley. This winery gem is in Palisade, Colorado, known for its peach orchards and wine vineyards. The climate, a 182-day growing season, makes Palisade "The Peach Capital of Colorado".Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021We are happy to recommend The Lowe Down with Kevin Lowe

What goes into finding a wine or whiskey worthy of investment? Do you have to be an expert to invest with Vint?   Our guests: Nick, Co-founder, and CEO of Vint - Head of Wine - Billy Galanko & Head of Investor Relations, Brady Weller.Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

We continue talking with Nick, Co-founder, and CEO of Vint, and Billy, Head of Wine. We get into how Vint sources their investible wines. Vint is the only SEC-qualified and FINRA-regulated platform for investing in fine wine and spirits. Much like investors buying shares of stock in companies, Vint.co is making it possible to buy shares of curated fine wine and spirits collections

Vint, the first fully transparent wine investment platform genuinely accessible to everyone.For less than $100, you can own SEC-qualified shares of the best wines in the world.Our guests are Nick, Co-founder, and CEO, and Billy Head of Wine at Vint.coYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We conclude our conversation with Michelle Bredeson. Did you know they have a cave at Carlos Creek Winery? We also talk about how big the Wine Club is and why membership is capped.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it.Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson talks about live music and beer events. What is Carlos Creek Wineries' biggest selling wine? Let's find out. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson introduces us to Minnesota's Winery of the Year for 2021. Can't forget about the The Grape Stomp event. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson educates us on barrels and the expanse of Carlos Creek Winery.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Meet the owners of Carlos Creek Winery - Hi! We are Tyler and Michelle Bredeson - two people with a love for wine, family & fun! We have been working at the winery since 2008 as part of a family business with Tami and Kim Bredeson (Tyler’s parents)! In 2022, we purchased the winery with a vision of our own. We will continue to create products and experiences that bring people together for celebration & fun! Along side our family and the Bold North Cellars family we are always reaching for this goal in everything we do. Wine and beer should be welcoming, fun, and most importantly, really, really good! Our focus is on quality over profit in all things we do. Come out and experience the Bold North Cellars difference and we look forward to celebrating with you! Visit Carlos Creek Winery in Alexandria Minnesota — Carlos Creek Winery - Home PageYour Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Michelle Bredeson is our guest. She is the Marketing Director and Co-Owner of Carlos Creek Winery. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

We conclude our conversation with Phil Plummer of Montezuma Winery in Seneca Falls, NY.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Phil Plummer, Head Winemaker at Montezuma Winery.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021

Welcome, welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is we continue our conversation with Phil Plummer of Montezuma Winery in Seneca Falls, New York. The last time we talked Phil, you were talking about texture. Could you explain that to me? So I think for me, I'll contextualize it around what we do here a lot. We're in a cooler climate region, so we're not going to have the big like hit you over the head tannins that you would get in a warm climate. But I think we also have this really super bright acid that we get in our wines here. And sometimes the texture is how you balance that. So I'm really interested in things where I can add weight without adding sweetness. Probably the clearest way that I've ever heard it analogized it is. It's like milk, right? So you have your lighter-bodied wines or like skim milk where they're not really mouth coating, they're just kind of here and gone. Whereas you're fuller-bodied wines are getting out to that whole milk territory where there's a little bit more something to chew on. There's room for both skim milk and whole milk, and it's just about figuring out what's right for the product you're making at the time. As the head winemaker, I'm sure you have a vast list of responsibilities that you have to do, but out of those, what do you consider to be the most valuable? You probably don't want really full-bodied cabernet in the middle of summer, but a really light-bodied zippy riesling is going to be perfect. I think every wine has its own parameters, and that's really the job of the winemaker is to figure out where the wine wants to be. For me was a pivotal point in my career when I stopped trying to make the wines that I wanted to make and started listening to the wines and trying to make them the way they wanted to be. And I can imagine that having that epiphany has opened up some other opportunities for you. What do you think? Are you most proud of the winery that you've done? I've done a lot of really cool Nats, and now we have a traditional method program that we've been adding to as we go. So those have been really rewarding for me to see that this is something that I've taken as my own little personal bailiwick. And just to see that other people are into it too is always cool. In doing research for getting ready to talk to you. I was kind of surprised that I found that New York is third in the states with the highest wine production and surprising that the Finger Lakes region in New York has well over one hundred wineries in just that one area. So it's a great story. I mean, we were like the original American wine region. If you're familiar with the bonding system on wineries. So every winery in the U.S. that's legal. You have to file a bond with the federal government and you get a bond. No, that's associated with your permit. So like here, our bond number is 896, which means we're the 896th winery in the U.S. Bonded Winery #1 is here in the Finger Lakes and it's at the south end of Kuka Lake and Hammonds Port, and that was the original home of Great Western and Gold Seal. They called it Champagne back then. You can't call it champagne anymore, and that's really where things started. And it was this big production facility and you had this whole industry that grew up with growers that their whole game was that they were growing for Taylor, Great Western Gold seal that facility. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, the Taylor family sold that property to Coca-Cola, and Coca-Cola came in and broke all those contracts. You suddenly have a production facility that's trucking in and by railcars, bringing in cheaper juice and bulk wine from the West Coast and this whole industry of grape growing families that have nowhere...

Our featured winery is: In this episode, we head to the town that hosted the first women's rights convention in 1848. It's also believed to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls, Mary, my wife Clarence, Merry Christmas everybody. Yes, the movie, It's A Wonderful Life, it's Seneca Falls, New York, home to Montezuma Winery. Hi, this is Phil Plummer. I'm the head winemaker for the Martin Family, Wineries Montezuma Winery. Under The Martin family, wineries and distilleries. You have Montezuma Winery, Old Forge, IDOL Ridge Winery, Alder Creek Distillery, and Hidden Marsh Distillery. We're going to focus on Montezuma Winery since you are the head winemaker, Phil. Let's get a little background on yourself. I'm originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I came to Rochester, New York, to go to college. I went to RIT and I was there for this really like specialized science computer science program, and I got a couple of years deep into that and came to the realization that I was headed for a life where I was going to be buried at a lab bench or behind a computer screen, and that terrified me through the hospitality school at RIT, I'd been taking wine tasting classes, so I decided to start making wine and beer in my college apartment, which was probably not within the letter of the law at the time, but I really fell in love with production. I like making things, and I always felt like maybe wine would be what I did if I won the Powerball someday.Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Voted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is we continue our conversation with Doug McCombs of IG Winery now on our last episode, you touched on some festivals. Let's dive deeper into all of the festivals that you're offering this year. We are what we call popcorn and wine pairings, so we have a wine professional out of Salt Lake who comes down and does a really fun pairing of different flavored popcorns with different wines from around the state. They're all again. All the wines featured at the event are Utah-produced wines. Then we do a farm to fork dinner, which we go out to a local farm and they put a big long table out for about a hundred people served family-style, all kinds of fresh food right off the farm, and we pair it up with a lot of different Utah wines. We do something called Epicurean on the edge, which is only about 30 people. But you drive out to a remote mountain's edge, sort of looking into Zion National Park and they put out a huge spread there. And there's the local chef that does all this remote cooking, and he puts an amazing meal out for everybody and again, all paired with Utah wines. We have what we call the grand dinner on Center Street, and we put a table the length of the street. And again, we have some local chefs who put together some fabulous food. We do a picnic in the vineyard, there's a vineyard in St. George. We host about 50 people. They can walk out in the vineyard. We have some stations out there where we're pouring wine that was actually grown right there in the row. They're standing in and produced from the grapes they're looking at. And so it's kind of fun to say, you know, you're standing here in the Tempranillo, and if you look to your left or right, you'll see the grapes and this is what we produced back in 2018 or something like that, you know, that's a lot of fun. Now these events, what are the costs? Because I imagine they sell out pretty quickly.Speaker2: They do. They usually sell out in about a month. We start sales in July on July 1st and usually by the end of the year. Toward the end of July, it's pretty much sold out. Tickets run anywhere from forty-five dollars to 120.00, depending on the event. Not only do you host these large events, but you host events like what I've got around my house with my wife and I have gone to many of them and there are paintings all over our walls at home, paint night. Yeah, we do a lot of paint nights during the winter when things are a little quieter. It's a good way to get people to come out and have some fun and enjoy some wine.Looking back at all that you've created, what do you think was your biggest attribute of perseverance?Yeah, this is our ten-year anniversary this year for IG Winery. The first two or three years were very tough. We just pushed through it and kept reinvesting in the business. We were not just building a business, we were building an industry where it never existed in the past. And so it just keeps pushing, keep pushing, be creative and how we market, just be as open and inviting as we possibly can with others who are looking to get into the business and encouraging and mentoring. And I try to do everything I can to put my arm around those who are going to ultimately become our competitors in an effort to really try to build our industry. And I think that's what works for us. Was there a point when that perseverance you could feel paid off and thought, OK, we've got something here? It was about the five-year mark when we moved out of the little space behind the B and B and moved into our current facility. We went up to almost 6000 square feet, and so all of a sudden we had lots of room to work and we...

Welcome, welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is in our last conversation, Doug. We ran out of time, so you couldn't explain Cocktail Lounge. What's that about it at IG Winery? The history on that was that we have a lot of locals who come in and do tastings, and they began coming in and saying, Look, you know, I've done plenty of tastings. Can I just have a glass of wine and sit and enjoy the tasting room and hang out with my friends? And of course, under Utah law, we can't just pour a glass of wine as a winery. However, if we acquired a bar license, we could pour you a glass of our wine and let you sit and enjoy it. So we did that. We went out and got the bar license. And but under Utah law, if you have a bar license, you have to also pour some cocktails under that license agreement. So we made up a few cocktails. And so from five p.m. to 10 p.m., you can come in if you don't want to do a tasting, you can come in and have a nice handcrafted cocktail or a glass of wine and enjoy the winery that way. Yes, looking at your menu, I see your handcrafted cocktails, your Maple Manhattan, The Arrogant Bastard, The Starter Wife, Caitie's Hard Iced Tea, Sweet Apple Spice, the IG-Tini, the wine tasting experience. Can you explain that? Well, we will do a tasting. We typically do five different wines as part of your tasting. If you're the type that likes to sit and have an explanation, we like to walk everyone through an explanation of each wine where it's from, how we made it, what the unique taste you know, components are of that particular wine and just, you know, take our time. So a tasting could take about an hour. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person that really just wants to have your wine and be left alone, it can go a lot quicker than that. So you moved into your new facility and you've got the cocktail lounge. And who's designing that you? I did. Yes, you did. All right. Yeah, yeah, it's been good. We used a lot of the old building materials that were there before we remodeled the building, so we gave it kind of a rustic-chic feel. It's a very inviting place and people enjoy the vibe a lot. I can tell just from our short conversation that you're very ambitious. You've started this winery with no previous winery experience and now you've moved into a brand new, beautiful facility. You've designed this cocktail lounge. I've got a feeling that you've got your fingers in something else as well. And then we just recently created the Utah Wine Trail, which will open in the spring of this year. And that'll be you've seen. I know these trails around, you know, different states where you, you follow the map and go to each one and get your card punched or something like that. And when you visited all the wineries, you get a little gift, and it's obviously designed to encourage everybody to get out, hit all the different wineries. And so we're starting that this year as well. So we're excited to see the growth and what the future has. Quite a little wine legacy here in Utah. Well, we're trying. That was our goal when we started out and think, thank heaven. We've seen some success with that, you know, to that point when we started. As I told you, we were the only ones in town as of today. Now there are six wineries in southern Utah that have grown up since we started this 10 years ago. So we've been kind of the trailblazer, if you will, for everybody else who's come along afterward, and that's by design. We wanted to see this area become a tourist. You know, wine begin to be able to promote wine tourism. So there have been several additional vineyards planted now. And like I said, six wineries are now open in the southern Utah area. We being IG Winery, in this...

Welcome, welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We continue our interview with Doug McCombs, founder, and winemaker of IG Winery. Since you didn't come from a winemaking background, getting started had to be difficult.Yeah, when we started in Cedar City, there was like I said, there were no wineries in southern Utah at all. So we came in and actually had to work with the city to help them develop zoning ordinances that would allow for a winery. We actually wrote those for the city and submitted them and the city passed them and got them through and created the zoning and the ordinances that we needed to allow for us. Then we opened our doors. We were just in a little, The whole thing was twelve hundred square feet. That was the tasting room, the storage area, the winery, the production area, everything. And it was just a small little building with a couple of tanks and a few barrels, and we started buying both bulk wine and grapes to make our wines and just begins the long, slow process of building a clientele in a market that there was no wine culture if you will, but there was really no, no real understanding of what wineries were all about. And so we had to educate the community and just begin that process. Since you were kind of trailblazing the wine industry in Utah, were you met with some resistance as people have their own preconceived ideas about wine? But then there are some who will say, well, it's just another versiThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our featured winery is in the state with the first 00:28 Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's the only state where every county contains some part of a national forest. It's the 2nd driest state in the United States. Almost 300 sunshine days a year, and its residents are the most charitable people in the country. They rank 1st in volunteer rates. 00:48 Doug McCombs. Owner and Winemaker of IG Winery in Cedar City, Utah. Your Host: Forrest Kelly is an experienced Radio/TV broadcaster who has interviewed some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities from Shania Twain to Kevin Costner. A lover of wine who is fascinated by the science behind it. Visit our websiteVoted one of the best travel podcasts of 2021This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, this is Forrest Kelly, and I'd like to take just a moment and look back on 2021, the year in review. First off, I'd like to thank my beautiful wife, Paula for her support of the podcast. And I couldn't have done it without you! Looking at the numbers and the analytics for the 2021 year. The biggest majority of listeners, of course, came from the United States. Second place belonged to, do you have a guess what country? India was second place and that was followed by the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The platform Spotify, as you know, has got a neat look back in 2021 with an email and program they call wrapped - downloads and followers on Spotify jumped by 200% this last year. Also, 10 of you listened to the podcast more than any other podcast. Thank you for that, and 30 percent of you listen from 11 to five. That's normal. And the most listened-to episode on any platform of 2021 was Michael Juergens. He was the gentleman that we interviewed that is bringing wine to the Kingdom of Bhutan. Second, the most listened-to episode was our series with Lakeridge Winery and Vineyards in Florida, and we started a YouTube channel on The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. So far. We've got over 350 subscribers. Would like to thank you for listening and participating with your listener voicemails. And as always, if you like the show, please follow and subscribe. Make sure you tell your friends and pets. Let's have a great 2022.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Breaking news.......Think about this, if you had the first bottle of wine ever commercially produced in America. Like, what would that bottle be worth? That bottle would be in the Smithsonian? Here it is the very first bottle ever produced in America or in France or in Australia or wherever. That's the first bottle that would be important. We missed the mark by hundreds of years in most countries, but I'm doing that. I'm going to make the first bottle, so I want to. The very first thing that we're going to do is make one barrel, which will be the first barrel, and then we're going to bottle those wines in a special bottle and kind of sell those to collectors who want to have a piece of the first barrel ever produced in a country of wine, which I think is kind of cool. First of all, I want to thank you for that breaking news. I think that's a great idea to plan that out, and it just might be lucrative for you as well, because looking at some of the most expensive wines sold. You've got charity cases, sometimes half a million dollars French wine, a bottle, a single bottle, three hundred thousand plus. Do you have any idea who might be interested in buying the first case or the first wine from the country of Bhutan? I would guess it would be places like, you know, the Wine Museum and Adelaide Australia. You know, people who the collectors like the Koch brothers, I don't know if they would be interested or not, but you know, the Koch brothers have historically bought interesting bottles of wine like, you know, the famous fake Thomas Jefferson bottles and so on and so forth. So I think it would be one of those wines that you would not open, right? You would say. But obviously, the very first bottle we would probably give to the first few bottles in the series would probably go to the country itself for them to save and posterity sake and their museums. I wanted to ask you about the highest elevation, where some countries and vineyards profess that they have the highest. Reminds me of a question from Alice of Muskogee, Oklahoma, who's a listener to the podcast, and she asked, I'm interested in knowing how different grapes and different grow based on different climates and different altitudes, and how that affects the different quality of wine produced. That's a good question. So what is your take on focusing on the elevation, not focusing on the elevation? So there's a huge debate about that. The Argentineans would say they've got the tallest. There's one in Tibet. It's about 11,000 feet. They would say that they've got the tallest. There's a lot of arguments about it. I could definitely have the tallest vineyard, the highest altitude vineyard in the world if I want it very easily. To me, I think that's sort of like a gimmick. And my goal is to not do gimmicky stuff. My goal is to try to capture the beauty of Bhutan in a wine bottle and share it with the world. And if that happens to align with the perfect plot at 13,000 feet, I would plant it in a heartbeat. But I don't. I don't think that it will. We've got the tallest. Yeah, like, we'll leave that to the people who want to do that sort of gimmicky marketing stuff. But hey, you know, we're still dialing things in and figuring out what works well where. So we may find that there's an awesome ice wine vineyard that we can plant Vidal at 13,000 feet and makes this glorious <a...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. We're speaking with a man responsible for bringing vineyards to the country of Bhutan, the Kingdom of Bhutan. How big a country is it? It's actually not that big a country. It's about the size of Switzerland. So it's probably, I don't know, 300 miles North to South and 500 miles East to est. Anywhere that you are you can sort of look in every direction and see mountains. But like Everest is behind those. And so you can't necessarily see Everest from most places. There's just one cool pass of Dochula Pass. It's about 14,0000 thousand feet. It's between the capital city of Thimphu, where we have a couple of vineyards, and the Valley, where we have a couple of vineyards. And so I drive over that pass quite a bit. And when you're at the top, there's this outlook that you can see like 17 different Himalayan peaks that are all in the low twenties and it's really freaking cool. And when you're flying into Paro, you can see average when you fly in, which is kind of neat too. So tell me about some of the advantages of the country. I mean, the obvious one is just the water that is coming off of the glaciers and the snow runoff of the Himalayas. I imagine there are others as well. So the soil is super, super vibrant. And so, you know, if you sort of believe in some of this, you know, biodynamic philosophy where you sort of getting this balance with the local ecosystems and the biomes and the soil and the local wildlife, that's certainly part of it. They're on track to be the first 100 percent organic country, so they're really sort of against interventionist agriculture. It's more about trying to find how things will work in those climates. The water is entirely microplastic-free because it's just pure runoff from the Himalayan glaciers. So you have this really good water and the climate. There's a lot of different microclimates there that sort of stretch from jungle at the bottom of the country, at the south side, all the way up to glacier. So you have all these different climate zones within the country that they are they figured out over the years like, Oh hey, you know, Mandarin oranges grow really, really well down here, where red rice grows really, really well at 7,500 feet. And my hope is that that's what we're going to find with our grapes is that Merlot grows really, really well at 3000 feet and Riesling grows really, really well at 7,500 feet. So my guess is that that's where it will evolve over time, as it's done with some of their other crops. But that's, you know, that's a 50-year plan, not a 5-year plan, unfortunately. With a business plan like that, you've done your homework and it sounds very encouraging down the line. Can you tell me a little bit about the potential markets? One of the leading roses in India right now is Mateus. I don't know if you're familiar with Mateus, it's a Portuguese rosé, which sells for about $5.00 bucks a bottle here in the U.S., and in India, it sells for $29.00 a bottle. There's a pretty significant margin opportunity if you can capture that market share without paying, those import taxes and tariffs. So there's it's one thing to go after

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is we continue our conversation withMichael Juergens and his wine adventure in the Himalayan hills of Bhutan. When all is said and done, what kind of wine are you looking to produce? We want to make wines that are going to be poured at the world'sfinest restaurant and cost $150 bucks and up. So $150 and above. I was reading where you said that you're not going to make plonk? I had to look up the term plonk. Would you consider that a derogatory term? No. I don't think plonk is necessarily derogatory. It's more that it's know kind of inexpensive wine. I think it's pretty much a British and Australian term. But you know, if you were going to drink, you know, have a nice glass of plonk, you know, I just want an easy drink in, you know, $4 glass of red as opposed to something that's super complex. It requires a lot of attention. So in your quest to become a Master of Wine, there are only four hundred and nineteen worldwide in 30 different countries. Has anybody else done what you've done and gone to a country and started a wine industry from scratch? No, not to my knowledge. No matter of fact, I don't think that there are very many countries left on the planet where you could conceivably start a wine industry from scratch. Most places already have been around having for hundreds or thousands of years. One of the things that really appealed to me about this project, you know, the Himalayas is not convenient to Los Angeles, which is whereI live, but the opportunity to really be given this palate, this beautiful landscape, this wonderful terroir with nothing and say here, decide what this should look like. You know, should we do ice wine? Should we do big reds? Should we do sparkling? Should we do hybrids? You know, what do you think is going to be the perfect winesfor Bhutan that will express a sense of place, and that's a really cool opportunity to get to do. I don't. Not too many people have gotten to do that. Oh, absolutely. What a great opportunity. So in the time frame, whenyou first went over there to run the marathon and you talked with them and you started this serious discussion, what are we looking at down the road from basically seed to vine? It took about two years from the very first serious discussions that we had. I had kind of broached the topic a couple of years before that, and it took a couple of years for the country to get to the point where they're like, Yeah, this seems legit. Let's get serious about trying to do this. And then once they had made that decision, it took about two years before we got the first six vineyards planted. And to your point, no, I absolutely was out there in the fields with not necessarily carabiners, but like digging holes and, you know, carrying plants up and down the hills. And, yeah, very excited. As you mentioned earlier, as you might expect, the Himalayas, very mountainous. I imagine there's a lot of prework that you had to do, you know, building terraces on the sides of mountains and things and prepping everything. But where are you in the stage as far as the vine progress? Six of our vineyards are in the fourth leaf and two of our vineyards are in the second leaf. So we actually had grapes last year, but the pandemic was going on and the borders were closed. We had grapes again this year, but there's still a lot of pandemic issues, particularly with India. You know, India has had quite the outbreak the last few months. And so Bhutan,...

Welcome, to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is. Hello. This is your captainspeaking. Welcome to Juergen's airlines, we hope you enjoy your flight to the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, Bhutan is sandwiched between two countries India and China on our flight thisevening is Michael Juergens, Michael has helped plant vineyards at nine thousand feet to start the first winery in the Kingdom of Bhutan. So sit back, relax and enjoy your flight. Remember, if we have a bumpy landing, it's not the captain's fault. It's not the co-pilot's fault. It's the asphalt.Hi, this is Mike Juergens. I'm the author of Drinking and Knowing Things and a number of other Wine Books. I also founded the wine industry in the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, and I'm a Master of Wine candidate.Ok, Michael, we'll get into each of those credentials, but first just doing a little bit of research on the Kingdom of Bhutan. They have 5,400 species of plants, compared to 17,000 here in the United States. They were one of the first countries to ban tobacco use. Archery is the number one sport. Health care is free. Where was the inspiration? What did the inspiration come from to start producing wine in Bhutan? Well, I had traveled all around the world visiting all the other global wine regions as part of trying to pursue my Master of Wine qualification. And when I went to Bhutan to run a marathon, it just looked like the kind of place that should have vineyards. You just had these magnificent terraced slopes with these beautiful crops.Everything I ate was the best. Whatever I've eaten, the best cucumber, the best carrot, like everything was just spectacularly good. And so that to me led me to believe that they had a vineyard somewhere. So I asked everybody, where are the vineyards? And turned out they didn't have any. And so I kind of said, you guys need to do this like starting now. And they listened.They listened to you. So you must have been very persuasive and shown them the potential of what could be right. Because Bhutan is, you know, looking at a map is and imagining the Himalayas. This isn't going to be the main thoroughfare for trade. Bhutan is pretty isolated in the Himalayas and so it remained pretty much on its own until, like the 1970s. You know, they just didn't have any Western influence. You know, the Silk Road never went through there, and so Vitisvinifera never got planted there. You know, the Roman Army never reached that far on the Silk Road didn't go through it. So I don't think it was a function of there wasn't, you know, a desire to to have it or to avoid it. Ithink it just never got there. And even today, you know, the country monitors who can go into the country. They don't want to overburden it with tourism. There just hasn't been a lot of Western influence in there, and it just took some stupid guy like me asking dumb questions like where the vineyards? And they sort of said, Huh,we hadn't thought about that, you know? So it wasn't that that this had never been broached before. It just was. I think I happen to be the right place at the right time where the country was a little bit more open to trying to make this...

We close out our conversation with Barry Hus of Lakeridge Winery and Vineyards, Florida's largest winery. I can imagine that staffing can be a bit of a challenge.I went to New York and recruited a vineyard manager that was highly experienced, and he's done wonders for our vineyards. I went to Sarasota. I recruited this top mechanic that had been in the industry for 45 years can fix any kind of bottling line equipment or anything that you have. And he's been the same thing. He's just he's helped us fix so much and saved us so much money with his expertise. So it's that kind of thing, that kind of recruitment that lends itself to providing a successful business, no matter what you're doing, you know, people make the difference. Having a winery the size of Lakeridge Winery & Vineyards, you've got a vast selection of wines. What are some that stand out that are your biggest sellers?Our most popular wines are our southern red and southern white. We also cross-label those as vintners, red, and vintners white at our other location. They're the exact same wines. That's 60 percent of our business. Those two are the main Muscadine wines that we produce one white, one red. After that, we make a bold blush. It's called Sunblush, and it's also Muscadine. And then we make a Chablis. We make a Chablis out of our white grapes. That's the driest of the Muscadine wines. They're both good sellers, the Chablis is great for cooking the sunblush. We call it the Goldilocks wine. It's a little red. It's a little wide, it's a little sweet, it's a little dry. You know, it's you don't know what to take to a party that's a great wine to take with you. And then becoming more and more popular are the specialty wines, and we're just getting to where we're having to ramp up our production of our sparkling. We do our own sparkling wine. We do two of them a white and pink. And we do. We still do them in the old champagne method. So we're doing the double fermentation on those. We make a port that's 100 percent Musk, nine, with a wonderful port. So those specialty wines are great. We also produce a Sherry. The Sherry is about 25 percent Muscadine. It doesn't lend itself to a great sherry. The white grape doesn't. So we're bringing that in and then blending it in with about 25 percent of the Muscadine. And then it produces a great, great Sherry after that. And then we have some kind of blends we do at what we call a proprietor's reserve. It's kind of a dessert-style wine. Again, it's a sweet wine. It's got a higher alcohol level than our standard table wine does. But it's not quite a port. It's gone over very well. Again, it's one of those sweet wines served chilled. Those are the main ones. Those are what we produce. Our main focus is on our Muscadine wines and our southern reds, southern wine by far our top sellers.It's been a pleasure talking with you and learning so much about Florida wine. If our podcast listeners are in the area or planning a Florida trip, what's the best place to go to get all the information we need? The best place to go to start is at our website, which is Lakeridgewinery.com And from there, you can get our hours and information about the weekends at the winery. Who's what bands are playing, what foods are being served, all that kind of stuff. If you want to call in, you can certainly do that. We have an 800 number. It's 800.768.9463. Be happy to answer any of the questions that you might have. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast...

COO Barry Hus, explains the adventure of a tour at Lakeridge Winery & Vineyards.So in our typical guided tour, when I say that they stay within the building, our main building is fairly large. It has a second floor, they go up into the theater. It's a church pew style. They sit and watch the film. It's about 10 minutes. It goes through the history of wine and winemaking in Florida and how we got involved in it. Then there are walkways that go across our production area and from the walkways. They can see our bottling line and our tanks and the processes and the pumps and everything and the workers down below. The guide would explain to them what's going on. We have cold stabilization going on or we've got bottling, going on, or whatever might be happening at the time. They then walk outside. We have an outdoor balcony on the back of the building that overlooks our crushed deck and the vineyard so they can see the vineyards from there. They can see the crushed deck and the equipment, the presses, pumps, and all that kind of stuff. And depending on the time of year, like right now, we just finished pressing the last of our grapes yesterday. So from August and early September, they can see the grapes being crushed. The rest of the time, they will see the vineyards in full bloom or dormant, you know, depending on the time of the year, and the guide will talk to them about that. They don't go out into the vineyard. And then from there, they come across another walkway mezzanine. Generally, Monday through Thursday, we're bottling. They can see the bottling line in action and then from there they go into the main part of the retail shop where our tasting counter is. Customers can get up close to the vines out in our festival area. They can walk right up to the vineyard and see the vines and the grapes and things like that.Pre-covid, in 2019, I see where Florida had over 130,000,000 million visitors, tourists. So out of those people, when they visit the winery, are you seeing some kind of commonality between the novice and the expert in your visitorship?Yeah, there's a commonality and they do run that full gamut, you know, from people who are very curious and have never seen it to people who have seen hundreds of them, you know, have been all over the world and seen them. I think the commonality is the surprise that something like this exists in Florida. Nobody thinks Florida is having any kind of wine industry at all, let alone something that's of this size. And then the flavor of the wine is so uniquely different from anything else that they're going to taste, and even people who generally are dry drinkers are surprised at it. It's a sweet wine, but it's more of a fruit-forward, kind of a sweetness and not like a sugary sweetness to it. We serve it chilled. It's very refreshing. It's something that goes well with the Florida climate.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COO Barry Hus of Lakeridge Winery & Vineyards explains the impressive details of Florida's largest winery. Whether it's food, cars, or houses, we're always looking for that wow factor. I still remember seeing my wife the first time in her wedding dress. So when people come up to your winery, can you tell me your wow factor? It's a big property. I think people are very surprised, first of all, that it's hilly. And when they pull into the property, it's kind of a Tuscan design, building, and layout of the property, and the vineyards surround the property on all sides. So when you drive up, you see a large open grass area and fencing that leads up to the large building that is the winery. People from all over the world come to visit us here because Central Florida is a very tourist-driven area. We hear a lot that it reminds them of Europe looking over the hillside, seeing the vineyards, seeing the style of building that we have. It's very reminiscent of things that you would see in Italy or France or things like that. So that's probably the biggest surprise that people are just shocked that something like this exists in this area and that is so large. We do have an outdoor area with large oak trees where we have music and a food court and an outdoor wine bar that goes on every weekend from noon to four on Saturdays and Sundays. And so they can come out even during the week, they can come out and get a bottle of wine, cheese tray or something like that, go out and sit at our picnic tables and just kind of enjoy the view. So it's very open. We like people to take a look around and see what's going on here and just kind of enjoy themselves while they are here. So it's not just kind of a walk into a retail shop, it's kind of a full experience.98LX4waVSSSCEMbvzbAKShow LessThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Florida started in the wine industry back in the early days when the settlers came over here. They discovered that these Muscadine grapes were here in Florida, so they tried to make wine out of them didn't particularly like the flavor of it. They went ahead and brought over their own varieties from Europe. At one time, there were thousands of acres of grapes here in Florida. But they discovered that in this climate, they wouldn't grow. There's actually a bacteria. It gets in the vines, and it leads to what's now called Pierce Disease. And so, when all the vines died out after a couple of years, they eventually moved everything out to the West Coast. The wine industry kind of fell off here, of course, and it wasn't until, I don't know, the eighties early 80s when families like the Cox family started Lakeridge Winery they decided that they were going to reinvigorate the wine industry here, and they were going to make wine out of the native Muscadine grapes that grow here naturally. They failed at first, and then they kept trying and eventually got the formula right and the recipe right. And we're here today as Florida's largest winery. Now when you say the largest winery, does that mean just visitors, or is that production? Yeah, we're Florida's largest by both visitorship and production. We are about one hundred and fifty hundred and sixty thousand case a year winery, which is by far the largest here in the state that's selling grape wines. There are a lot of other wineries here. There's only; I don't know, twenty to twenty-four wineries in the state. It's not a big industry here, and many of those are fruit wines, mostly blueberry wines because that's blueberries grow well here. There are a few like us that do grape wines, but we're by far the largest.

We take another listener voice mail question. It's time, boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi all. This is Rochelle calling from Nashville, Tennessee. My question to you is why? Why wine cost as much as it does. Nashville, Tennessee. I bet you're a big Dolly Parton fan. All right, Rochelle, let's tackle your question, it takes about 12 grapes to make a bottle of wine and table grapes are two dollars a pound. Exactly. You can't compare apples to oranges to grapes. There's multiple layers that add to the cost of wine. Let's start off with real estate. You need oceanfront property, per se, to grow a vineyard. Then you factor in the cost of wine equipment. Let's just say you want to use one French oak barrel that will cost you anywhere from eight hundred and fifty two thousand six hundred dollars for one barrel. And then once the wine leaves the winery, it's got to go to a distributor that adds to the markup. Then it goes to the retail store. All of those things factor into the cost of wine. But at the end of the day, when you got your feet up and you're sipping a glass, it's worth it.98LX4waVSSSCEMbvzbAKThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, New Mexico food is sort of a blend between Native American food and Mexican food is the best way I can describe it. Obviously, the red and green chili's are big, here and everyone's got their own recipe for that. So if you went to one restaurant, it's going to have different red and green in the spice level is going to be different than in the restaurant down the street. So our wine is definitely made for that sort of pairing. They're not really heavy either. So you know, some of the Napa cabs can run up 16 percent and ours are really right in between 12 and 13 percent. Just because they're lower in alcohol and because of the area, they're going to be a little bit higher in acid. So they're going to be very friendly like this. The kind of heat would go with slightly sweeter, would go great with that spicy food. So we've got actually recipes on our website. If you look under wine cider and food pairings, we'll have the hard cider, the ones that go to the hard, hard cider, the white wine, and the red wine. We've got 15. And it's working with that same chef that we use with our virtual tastings as well. So she participates in that. You're not cooking food on the property, right? We don't. But the chef that I've been talking about, she makes these makes Merlot popsicles. So we have those in our freezer. And then we also have this crostini box. She makes these homemade crostini and then blends them in with the local feta cheese and pistachios actually look pistachios from out of the dessert and local honey. So it's a really nice pairing with one of our whites. So when they get the crostini box, they get a half glass of white wine of their choice. But then other than that, we do have snacks. I mean, we try to stay local and we get local beef jerky and chips. And, you know, just something to nosh on with your tasting, Since you have such a large variety of wine and cider selections, I know it's going to be tough, but could you narrow it down to some favorites? There are two palates that we see on a daily basis. The ones that like the sweeter of the ones like the dry ones, the most popular for the dry wines. People really like the Montepulciano because it's number one at the vineyard.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can you describe for me the New Mexico scenery as you drive up to the winery? So it is a gorgeous drive. I drive from Santa Fe and it's when I first moved out here, just like this is like a Clint Eastwood film. It's so rustic. You know, you see the Mesa's as we're driving up. Then you get into the towards the Taos, you know, as you come into the Rio Grande Valley just north of Velarde, you really you're right next to the river. So you've got the Rio Grande on one side and then you have these huge mesas on the other side that are all littered with petroglyphsThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we head to the largest hot air balloon festival in the world. The state has more cows than people. Seventy-five percent of the roads are unpaved. From the top of Capulin Volcano, you can see five different states. The state has more PhDs per capita than any other. And nearly 50 wineries are located in New Mexico. Hi, this is Katherine Lautenbach, marketing director at Black Mesa Winery. Black Mesa Winery is in Velarde, New Mexico. So, just about 15 minutes north of Espanola. Or if you want to go from north to south? We're about forty-five minutes south of Taos, that great ski valley from Albuquerque. It would be a little over two hours. So if anybody wants to take the Breaking Bad tour, then after that, they can head north. Yeah, we do it. We close at six. But you could probably make it as long as you're efficient with that. Breaking Bad to for sure.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it take to win Pacific Northwest Winery of the Year?  “The reason you become Pacific Northwest Winery is that you can't just have a one-off vintage has to be, you know, a long track record of great wines that have, in this case, crushed the competition, you know, year after year. And we've done that. And it's amazing for us to do that with these wines.”- Coco Umiker - Winemaker & Owner,  Clearwater Canyon CellarsPacific Northwest Winery of the Year by Wine Press NorthwestClearwater Canyon CellarsCoco's Reserve, Rock n J BlendThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What wineries does Idaho's Winery of the Year look up to?Walla Walla Vintners  Reustle Prayer Rock VineyardsWine Press NorthwestThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Co-owner and winemaker Coco Umiker discusses what it's like not having money yet still running a successful winery. What are the benefits of living in a trailer park for 250.00 dollars a month? "We were just like the sandlot kids. We were good at what we did because we understood the science so well. We knew where we could cut corners and where we absolutely could not. And we made wine styles that we knew we could do well and didn't try to force a square peg in a round hole."-Coco UmikerClearwater Canyon CellarsThe Best 5 Minute Wine PodcastThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacySupport The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We continue our conversation with Coco Umiker of Clearwater Canyon Cellars. The last episode you kind of touched on the topic of Brettanomyces. It's always hard for me to say it, let alone spell it. B, R, E, TT, A, N, O M Y C E S - I've never been good at spelling orally because it is so difficult to say. Iin the industry, a lot of times people refer to it as BRETT - B, R, E, TT, wine.In looking it up, it comes from the Greek term for British fungus. You could see when you tell people how the process works at a molecular level, you can kind of see their eyes glaze over. Oh, my gosh. Getting a chemical lesson here for you. That's where the joy is, right?Oh, my God. Yeah. I love I was thinking yesterday, actually, how just obsessed Karl. Both are with the continual learning and crafting of wine from the grape to the bottle. This has been a crazy summer and we may only have like a week to to carve off or maybe not even a full week. We might have like a weekend to carve off a somewhat of a vacation. And we're actually talking about going to a different wine area and checking it out. You would think when you make and grow wine every single day, you would want to go do something else on your vacation. But yeah, we're obsessed. And you know, that science of it to me is where the magic is. The most interesting manipulation is if you want to say that you can do in a wine as a winemaker to make different flavors, really pop to accentuate certain characteristics. Seemingly simple timing of adding oxygen timing on leaves and how you manipulate that leaves. So leaves is like all the yeast and little bits of skins and grapeseed that settle at the bottom of the barrel. You put that great must when you're done fermenting through primary fermentation, you put that grape mass in the press and you press it off and people either go to a tank or a barrel. I usually go to a barrel. You know, the press removes a majority of the skins and seeds, but not all of it. There's always little bits that get through the yeast. And a lot of times you continue fermenting in the barrel for a while through the fermentation and things like that. So when all is said and done, it settles to the bottom of the barrel in this delicious mud. It's kind of a red color usually because it takes on some of the wine color and yeast and bacteria and a little bit skins and seeds. And how you handle that leaves as a winemaker is a big dealBecause we jump back for just a second in the time frame. Was there a point because you are so young and you're starting out with this ambitious goal, was there a point when you said, wow, what kind of an epiphany we can make this work?Yeah, it's funny. You know, nobody's really asked me that question before. My family's been here since 1916 and I'm the fourth generation. 1916?Yeah. OK, so we're in Idaho Century Farm. Sometimes people ask me why the farms lasted and I believe it's because we've all been long-lived. My great grandparents started it. Grandma Irene ended up having to run the farm on her own. Actually my great grandfather died, but my great grandmother Irene lived to be 93. She passed it on to my grandfather, who lived to be 96. And then he was the one that Carl and I discussed this next generation with him about like the next hundred years, Grandpa, like, what did it look like for us? And then we came to him and my mom, too. So my mom is still living and grandpa and my mom really kind of handed the baton to my my husband and I. But when we asked them if we could plant that quarter acre, you know, I think most of Lewison probably thought we were kind of crazy. I was twenty two. I was...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We head to my hometown. It's where I grew up and at 10 years of age, delivering the Lewiston Morning Tribune newspaper spent many of Saturday mornings canvassing the neighborhood looking for lawn mowing and car washing jobs so that I could head to Lewis-Clark State College play pinball all day long. I also learned to hunt and fish accumulated hundreds of miles in the Army Corps of Engineer levee system. I also began my radio career here as a senior in high school and started working full-time at KOZE FM and AM. We head to the panhandle of Idaho to the city of Lewiston. My name is Coco Umiker and I am a winemaker and co-owner of Clearwater Canyon Cellars.  Ok, Coco, you've really built Clearwater Canyon Cellars into something impressive and we'll get to that later. But where did this begin?  Well, it really started with my love of science and strangely, it stretches all the way back to when I was a little kid. But I was 11 years old. I had cancer. And that ended up, you know, I being in hospitals a lot and around medical people. And so when I took off for college, I'm much better now. I'm good. Got through it in good shape. But when I went off to college, I thought, you know what? I'm going to be a pediatric oncologist and the undergrad premed program at the University of Idaho. They encourage students to do a double major in microbiology, molecular biology, and biochemistry. I got into it and I loved it.Wow. That's very ambitious, microbiology, OK? I could see how that could dovetail into winemaking is Louis Pasteur. You're kind of originated that and then molecular biology, seeing how the biological activity in and between cells and then biochemistry, the processes with living organisms, I could see where that would be kind of all-consuming with your time and your thoughts and your studies. But I'm guessing that's not the course that you ended up takingPartway through. I just realized that I wanted to do something more creative. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be able to come back to my family farm in Lewiston and do something with that place. I never lived in Lewiston, I lived in Boise. I spent all my summers up in the Lewis and farm with my grandparents. And so I stayed in that degree and was just this hardcore science nerd. So University of Idaho and Washington State University are about eight miles apart in Washington State University is the leader in the northwest in terms of wine programs. And so it was very wonderful for me because I was able to actually cross some classes. And in the program over there, I was so sold. I mean, I just when I found and discovered fermentation and wine and all of that, I was like I knew that's what I wanted to do. I actually planted so my boyfriend at the time and I ended up becoming my husband he I second to last year of my undergrad. So I was two thousand three, asked my grandfather if we could plant a quarter acre of vines on the family farm down here, and he let us do it. And then in two thousand four, we started a winery in a garage.So in two thousand four, you start the winery with your boyfriend at the time, Karl, who turns out to be your husband later to start the winery, because you've got all of these angel investors lined up and you've got all this money and you think it's a great idea. Let's start a winery. Right?  We had three other partners in the beginning of Clearwater Canyon because we were young and we had no money. At that point, Karl had paid off his student loans. You got a sweet deal. He actually grew up in Arkansas and his dad was a professor at the University of Arkansas in the music department. So he...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast; I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: we conclude our interview with Dean Andrews of Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards in Virginia.I think I would have you talk to Brooks because Brooks is actually an awesome story because he's one of the people I mentioned earlier. OK, let's bring Brooks into the conversation. Brooks, would you agree with that? Is it interesting? Interesting or long? That depends on the listener. I have definitely been here for pretty much the whole decade that we've been here. And I started in the kitchen. I then became a chef. So I worked on the code line helping prep, and worked weddings. And then I became a bartender, and then I became the senior bartender. And then I left to work with our winemaker. I came back, and then I became our vineyard manager. I operate more as our vineyard production manager now. So, Jack, of all trades, master of none, I guess.In doing all of those different jobs and things, where does education, where does college come into the mix?At the time, I wanted to add a degree, and I was going to get my degree and go back to grad school. So I went to the front of the house, and that's how I started studying chemistry, and that got me into one. So my degree was actually in psychology at the time. I was actually taking my degree and then go to grad school for, you know, potentially, you know, either like becoming a psychiatrist or a clinical counselor. But to get my brain back in school mode, I started taking chemistry. And that led to me thinking, well, fermentation science is pretty cool. I thought I was throwing around the idea of making beer, but I already worked at the winery at the time. So I was like, well, let's just see where this goes. And half a decade later, I'm running the production for an entire winery. You know, it's funny because I haven't actually gone to school for viticulture or winemaking. So if you can show it to me, you know, show me three times, you know, I'll try and get it right by their time. And especially when you're working in a vineyard, know you can read books about pruning techniques and how to deal with a vineyard. But until you actually do it, you know, it's a different story.At the time, we're recording this. Just looking at your temperatures, the highs are in the upper 70s to the mid-70s, and yet the overnight lows are dipping into the 30s. What are you doing at this time of year when you see that kind of temperature?We're still technically in what I call frost watch season. Frost can come and kill your entire crop. I've been basically on call for all of April. I consider myself on call until the end of May. So there's only really a couple of things you can do. One is just hope and pray that it doesn't get below 32 degrees. But we're looking for that freezing point, 32 degrees. And we're looking at the wind speeds because it's breezy, like about five miles per hour, six, seven, eight miles per hour. The wind isn't going to settle, and the wind is carrying water vapor. And so you also have to look at the dew point. If the dew point is getting close to the actual temperature. That means that the water droplets are going to settle, and they're going to crystallize and freeze. And that's going to necrotize your blood tissue, the blood tissue, necrotizing; then you're not going to get a flower to pollinate. So we have these wind machines that we can turn on, and they're amazing machines. And essentially, it's a helicopter blade fan that's attached to a tower, and it rotates like your normal house fan would. But in a 360-degree radius above us, there's this pocket of warm air about 100, 150 feet up. And the spinning of that fan creates a vortex that...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: OK, in this episode, and I'm just going to give you some random questions, Dean. I can imagine having a farm and vineyard located in Virginia. It's very scenic. So what do we see when we come into the parking lot of Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards? You're looking out over the valley, OK It is up on the high side of the valley facing west, and that there are four mountain ranges. When you come out of the valley, it ends up being where the Blue Ridge Mountains are. So you got four beautiful mountain ranges sort of float in your view and the future and you think they will never be developed close in because John Grisham, the author, owns a big chunk of the ones right in front of us. And the rest of it is part of our Bondurant farm, which is a conservation easement ownership group. So it is all rural. We won't have any homes or anything built in our viewshed. And you're looking out over our six acres of vines, down across a wildflower meadow, and over to some closer woods where we've been able to go in and pull out all the invasive species. And there is a program this last year that was granted to plant native trees. So we were able to go in and replace it with some native oaks and other trees. So it's just a very pristine rural view, very calm.Well, your wife, Lynn, has an exceptional design and event expertise and founded EASTON Events, so merging those two worlds together into the creation of Capitol Hill Farm and vineyards. Was that a difficult transition?After I left, Orient-Express Lynn's business on the Easton Events side was just taking off. She had been doing events just here in Virginia but was beginning to do more nationally. And one of the points she mentioned to me was that she had a lot of clients who really wanted to come to this particularly beautiful part of rural Virginia and to host an outdoor wedding. But there really weren't enough places to do it. And that was when the lights sort of went off my mind. I thought I always sort of love the winery and the vineyard business from having been involved with it in Italy primarily, and so wanting to do it. And it provided us a means of both collaborating and working together. And without Lynn, we wouldn't have been able to get those the initial clients to come in to help underwrite the overall investment. So doing weddings and private events helps underwrite the broader picture of the wine business. So that was kind of what our collaboration was. And her office is still here with us out here. And she also has an office in Charleston, South Carolina as well. So it's been it's been a great partnership because not only are we partners in life, it's now seven grandchildren. But we also have been able to work successfully together with Lynn taking lead on some of the design side and some of the concept development side and my kind of make it happen on a day-to-day basis.We both wanted this important point. We both wanted to create a winery which had a very experiential focus if you will. And what I mean by that is we have, in addition to just doing wine tastings and focusing on just the wine as a singular aspect of it. We do cooking classes, we do horticultural gardening classes, we do some classes. Which are your traditional Sunni view of what we're doing with our wines? Of course. And then seasonally, we do each fall harvest full moon dinner where we bring our primarily our wine club members out and we take over the lawn and we are doing outdoor tables and you're able to go down and actually see some grapes being harvested and go down the garden and you pull up some of beets out of the ground and become part of the dinner. And then the...

Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards - North Garden, VA Pt. 3Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast; I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery: we continue our conversation with Dean Andrews' of Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards. The wine industry has a five billion dollar economic impact on the state of Virginia, and Virginia ranks in the top 10 of most wineries per state. So I imagine, Dean, that you are always looking to improve and enhance the experience of when people come to visit your property. We also have been looking at what we can do when people get here. We have a garden map. So if they want to take some time to get to know the property a bit more, you can do a self-guided tour of the vineyards and understand what is planted, where you can go down the garden and see the seasonal variation is bed by bed. You can go and play with the chickens for a while and come up for your table. So it again is delivering on that full farm experience.Ok, let's suppose that I'm in the area, and I'm going to Washington, D.C., visiting the Smithsonian Institute and checking out the Struggle for Justice exhibit. And I want to visit Pépin Hill Farm and Vineyards. Tell me what happens after that.You're in Washington. You want to come down here on Sunday and have the two-hour wine experience and the food and wine experience and garden tours and all that. You can go on our website, and you can pick the date in the time size of your party. You click on it, you have a confirmed table for that time, and then we're able to communicate with you in advance to set expectations, answer any questions. And so we know that you will actually be showing up at that time. And it's great because ninety-five percent of the people are book show up.Soon after I do the two-hour wine tasting experience, I'm getting hungry, so I want to get some food. What is that step like?When you come here to the tasting room, every single dish we serve along with our wines is part of our wine pairings. We don't do the traditional thing where you come in and just do wine tasting and wine pairings. We have it set up with food, so every dish has one or maybe two wines that are specifically designed to be paired with that dish, to come to sort of like small plates, to come in with small plate cuisine experience. And we have the equivalent of a chef's table, which we call the vintner's table. You know, anywhere from eight people, up to 12 people. That can be four-course, five-course that are paired with our wines. So it really presents a real-world example of how the cuisine in the wines parallels each other."This place inspires me to come to work every day and look at this view is magical, and being able to pick things fresh from our chef's garden gives me even more respect for my ingredients and the environment." That's a direct quote from your chef. Ian Rynecki is one of the top catering chefs in New York. In Manhattan, he and his wife planned to leave Manhattan, will come down and settle into a quieter, smaller town for the next chapter in their lives. So I have a strong culinary team. Diane has three people working for her on the viticulture side, and we have a full garden. In the last two years, we've added on chickens, and we've got our bees. So we make our own honey, we've got chickens, and we've got gardens. So really, it's a complete story.Whenever I go on vacation, and I visit someplace memorable, I love to bring back a little souvenir, a little reminder of the great time I had. And you've come upon a great idea.We put together these terrific small glass bottles for people can custom select put wines they want to taste. We give them tasting notes and a card. And because they have these files,...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. We continue our conversation with Dean Andrews' of Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards through your networking and connections. I love the story where you tell me about how you incorporated your winemaker into Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards. Well, yeah, actually, interesting points. When I took over and we bought the 21 Club in New York from the original family. And so we came in and spent money converting their former apartments into the private dining board rooms. And we revamped the whole thing and we did the whole original prohibition area. The wine cellar is part of that. I put together a marketing program for we would bring in winemakers from every region in the world where we own the property. So we brought in winemakers from South Africa. We were brought in winemakers from France, Italy, and because we owned Keswick Hall here in Charlottesville and the Virginia wine industry, and Monticello Wine trail was just getting going back then. Back then, we're probably only like three or four vineyards at all within wineries. And we were the 10th to join but before that. So I was doing bringing in winemakers into the twenty-one club to do private lunches primarily for the press and influencers. And so I came across Michael Shaps, who is our winemaker here. He was just getting his business going, making wines. He's classically trained in Bordeaux. So he was here trying to make it work in Virginia. So I hooked up with him. He is our winemaker. So we now own a portion of his custom crush business as well. As custom crush is more popular in California than it is elsewhere. But we have about a dozen clients and we are the anchor or the largest one, and we're the anchor on it. But he has other smaller private labeling and custom blending that we are doing for other members as well. So Michael Schatz's are our winemaker and he is someone that I met. Probably almost 10 years before we opened here. So Michael and I have known each other and worked together for about 20 years. Now you've got your winemaker, but your hiring is not finished there. So we started off with a viticulturist and then we were able to hire the horticulturalists. Diane was the lead horticulturist at Monticello, Jefferson's home here. So she had a huge experience. We bought some railroad ties and they did about eight or ten raised beds, primarily to grow herbs for the garden. I'm guessing here. But just looking at how organized everything is around your website and everything is done for a reason, then what's your growing and cooking is in harmony with the wine.When you come here to our tasting room, every single dish we serve along with our lines is their wine pairings. We don't do the traditional thing where you come in and just do wine tasting and wine pairings. We have it set up with food, so every dish has one or maybe two lines that are specifically designed to be paired with that dish, to come to sort of like small plates, so you come in with a small plate cuisine experience. And we have the equivalent of a chef's table, which we call the vintner's table, you know, anywhere from eight people, up to twelve people. That can be four-course, five-course that are paired with our wines. So it really presents a real-world example of how the cuisine in the wines parallels each other.Looking back at 2020, and even into this year, what have you taken out of the pandemic and modified perhaps to make the winery and the farm better?In order to both control, the people coming in from the tastings for just overall safety and sanitary cleanliness? We changed the spacing and we went to a pure reservations model. So now and it's continued, even though we're...

We visit the state of Virginia, home to our latest winery. Hi, this is Dean Andrews from Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards outside Charlottesville, Virginia. There are over two hundred fifty registered vineyards and wineries in the state of Virginia. Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards is located in the Monticello American viticulture area. It's a member of the Virginia Winery Association in the Monticello Wine Trail. As we will learn in the upcoming episodes, Pippin Hill Farm and Vineyards has got everything your imagination could want in a farm and winery. And Dean, what inspired all of this? I was interested in building up my own small boutique hotel winery ownership and management company because, for a number of years, I was the senior operating officer of Orient-Express Hotels. I joined them in nineteen ninety-five when I sold our Charleston Place Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina; as part of building up Orient Express on the North American side, we owned a number of fantastic luxury businesses, including the 21 Club in New York. So the 21 Club, which has one of the largest and most renowned wine cellars in the U.S., was also a good experience for me to learn. And I was able to get the import license to bring the Capannelle wines into the U.S. So I think I sort of understood the winery business from a very pragmatic, entrepreneurial. How do you build up a winery? So it's not about going in and planting grapes and then kind of figuring out what happens down the road. So it is a much more strategic investment. And after having left the Orient Express, my wife, Lynn, and I, we're settled here in Charlottesville, and we're taking a look at what we can do together as a partnership on the business side. Lynn has Eastern events, which is one of the premier destinations, wedding planning, and design. I'm proud of her. She's been named by publications like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and Town and Country Weddings is one of the top planners and designers for her industry literally in the world. So we put our heads together, and we looked at what she's probably 20 different properties and kept coming back to this one particular location. And then we brought in viticulture, listen, to determine what the soil was like and the wells and everything. And that's how we decided to go ahead and build up and launch Pippin Hill. So after doing your due diligence, seeing that the area and the soil can sustain a winery, how did you decide what type of winery you would create? Because not only have you got to financial responsibility, but this part of Virginia has got a huge history of deep, rich American history. And you want to do all of that proud. We set out to build a very different business model for the winery. We wanted it to be a culinary winery, which had a really strong connection to our immediate grounds. So when we put together the initial business plan on it, we hired a viticulturist, obviously, to help us get the vines in and sort out the soil conditions in the varietals. And we expanded the starting from six acres to where we now have 40 acres. So it's growing a lot when we start the first year, only doing fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred cases, and we're up to about ten, twelve thousand cases now. So it was very much a planned growth. And we also...

Grape experimentation, paint night its part of our concluding conversation with Patrick Zimmerer of Table Mountain Winery in Huntley, Wyoming.

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure and wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We continue our conversation with Patrick, owner of Table Mountain Vineyard in Wyoming. I think, Patrick, you offer a flair that not many wineries in the entire world can't offer, you've got other crops that you're working on simultaneously while producing wine? Well, we still do traditional farming as well to try and keep the farm going. The winery has turned into 10 acres. Could really be a full-time job. And we do it as well as we can. But, yeah, we do need you to know, when they tell you to diversify in any industry, they don't. So you need 10 or 20 more people to handle that extra little extra hats that you wear. So on top of that, you've been hosting we have the winery. You know, we're grateful and we've kind of become a community hub. We hosted wedding showers and baby showers and weddings and classes on the weekend. So we really do have four or five different very active parts of the winery all in play. But they do come out to make a be a successful venture that the thing itself and allows us to stay on the farm and keep enjoying what we enjoy. How much has the vineyard grown since you first started? In terms of the vineyard. When we started in 04, we probably had about five acres total of grapes. We kind of keep planting every year. We never did everything on one big block. We started our very first year with three hundred minding our own wine and then progressively planted one two acres every year. So right now in 2021, we're about ten acres, which we we do about a thousand vines per acre. Our capacity in terms of the winery ebbs and flows based on the weather. We'll have a bumper crop and then the next year will have a very, very small harvest. So our our capacity, we're pretty variable, three to six thousand gallons in terms of wine, which we measure in gallons, which tells you how small we are. But again, we're just a pretty small mom and pop and son shop. And we do harvest anywhere in terms of grapes. We do have some other growers who grow for it. We go anywhere from 15 to 30 times a grapes a year. Obviously, last year, 20, 20 was a change for all of us. But how have you adapted to the new retail climate? Yeah, I'd say most people really hit the ground running with online sales and where we self distribute, we really slowed our retailing or our wholesale down just because we needed to. Our retail sales just here at the tasting probably made up 60 percent this year, which is about 40 percent wholesale. In other years we've been flipflop that way, 60 40 the other way. So we do have an Internet presence. We don't ship as much as we probably or more to that avenue as much as you do. We kind of just stick more to our base and through the tasting room and then through retail stores that we do have. How many different kinds of varieties of grapes are you growing? We have about 14 different varieties that we're growing up grapes and a few of them weather related, soil related, don't always show up at the same time. So we have a few that we'll get a harvest off of maybe every two to three years. We have some other growers who kind of ebb and flow the same way. So at any given time, we can have about 10 to 11, 11 different wines. Right now we're at a pretty constant seven with the variety that we have that continually produce your labels. Looks like you have a lot of fun. Did you do the labels on all of your wine? We do. It's kind of a collective family and friends effort. But we will you know, we're modeling here in the vineyard. We we try and come up with names and and different labels. And a lot of the labels are inspired or this artwork of pictures we take around the farm and then again, some retro kind of...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is in part two of our conversation with Table Mountain Winery in Huntley, Wyoming. Patrick explains what a lawyer is doing running a winery. Focused on agricultural law, natural resource law in Wyoming. We're pretty arid, so water laws a very important aspect to anybody in agriculture in Wyoming. Just once the entire west, just water rights protecting what we have. And I mean, that's the basic one. We have a lot of endangered species in Wyoming that producers have to work around and the ins and outs of trying to keep agriculture going and the regulations that come out of the industry that producers have to face and how to deal with those. Yeah, you are facing some different obstacles. I see where there are twenty four species in Wyoming that are endangered, including the black footed ferrets, the Canadian lynx, yellow billed cuckoo, some very familiar with what I see early on in the farm before wine became a crop, you had sugar beets, beans, alfalfa, corn. Throughout the decades, our farm is always in a diversified farm and we kind of change with the way the industry goes. And in the 2000s, the sugar beet industry was leaving our county and leaving our area. It wasn't you have to be pretty big scale this thing. And so, again, my thesis was just looking at ways to take small acreages, keep them in agriculture and maybe be able to do something different with them. And, you know, growing grapes is the most value added ag products you can get from, you know, from berried bottle and from the ground up. You're in control the grapes. And if you choose to go the winery route, it truly is a 100 percent value added ag product, which was something that our state was a little behind on. And we had some microbreweries, but we just didn't have an industry that really focused on that at the time. So you've got this plan put together and then what happened in 2004 kind of threw you curve. All these grapes on the ground. I think by 2004 we had five or six acres producing. We found a winery in a nearby town, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and they were producing wines with grapes from Colorado. And they said, we'll buy anything you grow. But we weren't too worried about the winery part because we had a market. And that spring when we were going to start to kind of have our first harvest, we called them and checked in on them and they said, oh, we're closing, we're disbanding of the company and we're no longer going to be a winery. So our kick start with our business plan that we had created really went into play immediately in the 10000 that we won, disappeared very quickly by the time we had our old farmhouse that we converted quickly and changed a few things around and were able to have a makeshift winery, probably home brewers had a better set up than we did when we first became a winery. But we we were able to get it done and and we had no idea of what would happen with harvest. We started kind of home winemaking on the side, but we we sure learned a lot just by the grapes coming in and having to figure out how to go from there, Having the experience of being a farmer with the sugar beets and alfalfa and the corn, etc. I'm sure that helped a little bit. But there had to be a learning curve in growing grapes. Grapes are very drought tolerant, if you will. I mean, we planted our grapes in the midst of one of the worst droughts that we ever had. We kind of joke for about three or four years. They haven't seen much water at all. We went to a few workshops and they said, you have to make the vines struggle. You can't over water, then hibernate in the winter. And this was all based on the Eastern Nebraska University, Nebraska. And we went to a few...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure and wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is. In this episode, we head to the state that is the 10th largest state in the area, it's the least populated, it's home to Old Faithful. In Yellowstone, almost half the state is owned by the federal government through national forests grasslands. An Air Force base, Rocky IV was filmed here, Ivan Drago not on the frozen landscape of Russia, but the Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming. Hello, this is Patrick Zimmerer of Table Mountain Vineyards and Winery in Wyoming. Owner, winemaker, and we are Table Mountain Vineyards and winery. We're actually growing grapes and making 100 percent Wyoming wines. So before Table Mountain Winery, there was the family farm. And what year was that established? In 1926. So kind of the establishment of our family farm, which is still in our family today, my great grandfather homestead in World War One veteran and I came to this area from Nebraska to Homestead and make a farm, Keeping your farm going as a full-time business. So I mentioned it to starting the winery was probably inspired by you. I was a senior at the University of Wyoming. My major was AG Economics. We had to do a thesis project. I came home one winter. There was a meeting. We live right next to Nebraska from the University of Nebraska about growing grapes and the possibility of starting a new industry, the wild area basically throughout my thesis paper, and thought it was interesting enough to write a whole paper on it. And after that was said and done, my dad said, you did all this work. We've got a few acres here and there with plant grapes, and that's really how we got into it. No plan was kind of a vision of trying to grow something outside of the realm of normal agriculture in Wyoming and being able to keep the same amount of land and start a new venture off of this. So this is two thousand one. We've already landed a man on the moon, and yet wine and grapes hadn't been grown in Wyoming, in Nebraska, in the area before that successfully. They had not been not successful. I mean, there were a lot of homesteaders and immigrants throughout the generations that brought grapes with them. There's some history to find that there would be some Italians here and there who would just bring truckloads of wine or grapes in from California or wherever. But nobody was actually trying to essentially do a vineyard. But at the time, there weren't any spots truly in Wyoming climate-wise that the traditional vinifera would grow there. So it took 20 years in the making from the University of Minnesota and other great leaders in the Midwest that we're able to develop these cold, hardy hybrids that can survive our very, very cold winters. Yeah, I would say Wyoming is extreme weather climate is drier and windier in comparison to most of the United States with greater temperature extremes. The average high temperature during November, December, and January is a robust thirty-four degrees. In part two of our interview with Patrick of Table Mountain Winery in Wyoming, we'll find out how getting a law degree helps in the winemaking business. What's going to happen at this time? Boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Devin from San Antonio. I was wondering if you could grow grapes in any climate. What's the coldest climate the grapes grow in? And do all fifty states produce grapes within reason? Yes, you can grow grapes. In any climate, many European international grape varieties could survive temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, Minnesota's most popular cold climate hybrid varieties have been studied to survive temperatures as low as minus thirty-five. Wind production is undertaken in all 50 states. In fact,

Welcome. to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. We finish our interview with Wollersheim Winery. Phillip, you're just not a winery, are you? I started the Distilling Side in 2010, and then my son and Celine's husband, Tom Leonard is the distiller is managing that side of the business. I do all the tasting with them. We have about maybe twelve hundred barrels of aging right now of bourbon, brandy, rye, apple. And I love tasting, so I'm always involved in the tasting. I can't run it all. My son is running the bistro. So Roman went to. So you did UW Madison in Food Science and then you went to France and he did. Bocuse Culinary School is one of the greatest culinary school of the world. So Roman studied at that school. And so now we can do we have not we're not calling it a restaurant. We have a bistro. So we're not opening in the evening for supper and fancy stuff like that. A sandwich, that bread. It looks fancy looking at the website and the menu. It looks Fancy. Yeah, it is fancy without the price tag. I'd like to find out where the passion lies. And I think asking what you're most proud of. We'll answer that. Proud of showcasing Wisconsin that it is not all Bordeaux and California, that we are a profitable and valuable, vibrant, beautiful business, that we are supporting 40 families. Yeah, we have 35 Full-Time Employee, 50 Part-Time. And we spread the wealth. You know, we have four weeks of paid vacation after ten years plus one week of sick days. We've done it a little bit the French way. So that's the pride of showcasing Wisconsin. And yes, it can be done successfully. You said at the winery, small was small and it's had gone through some changes and things. But looking at the website, it looks massive. How big is the property? It used to be small. I mean, the winery we used to make whining about where the eight foot ceiling and that bone is no longer there. So in nineteen ninety three we built a fermentation room and then we expanded our scenes just to give you a quick scale. And I will answer your question on the property. We we were doing eight thousand gallons in 1984. We doing two hundred sixty thousand gallons today. Wow. From the barn to just 260000 gallons now.So the property itself is about eighty acres and is 20 acres of vineyard on this property. And then we lease another 10 acres miles down the road. Yeah. Because you've got you've got three businesses kind of all packaged on to the property, you've got the winery, the distillery and then the bistro. Yeah. And it's looking, you know, just looking at the website, it's it's you know, very Wisconsin built a tough room for the elements. It's beautiful. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, in 1993 when we did our first expansion, we rented a car because we we didn't to have a car that could take us all the way around Lake Michigan. We rented a car and we drove all the way around Lake Michigan and we stopped at many wineries. Schottel, Grand Traverse, Leelanau Peninsula, all the way down to San Julian. And it for us, it was pointless to go to California to visit winery because we're dealing with two feet of snow and inches of ice and it's winter from December 1st to March 1st. So, yeah, it has to we have to think of where do we put the snow? Where do. You know, the truck insulation, so the pipes don't freeze and also everything is inside. Everything is insulated. So from the outside, you don't realize how big it is inside with. We have 40 tanks that are fifty eight hundred gallons, you know. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest calling this episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by I his if you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time or the...

Welcome, to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is as we continue our conversation with Philippe Coquard of Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin. But looking at your website, I see you've got a wine called Domaine Reserve. If we're going by just price. This is the most expensive wine you have. However, there's a reason for that. Explain that to me a little bit. Domain Reserve is made out of 100 percent Marshall for a French American hybrid. The vines are 48 years old. It is on our steeper slope. It's picked last. It's made as traditionally as it gets. It is age wine, you and Custom-made Barrel of Wisconsin, oak and French oak. We were the first winery in the nation to request 50 50, exactly the same number of Stav of French Oak and Wisconsin Oak. We've been doing that for 25 years. And that wine is you can put down that wine next to a cow going call a coolness. It's it has its own. Talulah It is one field. Nobody else in the world is making a wine like this Domain Reserve. And that to me is is the pride and the difference. It doesn't have to be Cab from Bordeaux or from California. It's we can do it here as well. Well, being the owner and the winemaker and having your experience that you've got, you can basically do everything at the entire winery. However, what is your favorite part? Oh, man. Oh, I love to. Well, I'm going to do I'm going to make myself a teacher someday. All I want to do is grow grapes. I want to do is make wine because you know, the business side of it. You know, the air travel side to finance or. Yeah, it's all part of business. But man, I'd rather be next to a barrel and taste a wine out of the barrel with my daughter. One of my passion is to pass the same passion to my daughter, Céline who will be the next winemaker after me. My she is thirty three. Thirty two, thirty three years old. She is our war in enologist and she is in my footsteps tasting wine with me. So I love tasting wine. I love to be in the vineyard. I am a grape farmer winemaker. So she got a little higher degree than you. I see she's a master of wine science from Cornell. Absolutely. And I so welcome it. I got everybody. She is a lot smarter than me so she can run the lab. She talks sexy like you though? No, I'm the only one stuck with a French accent. Gotcha. OK, OK. I'd like to ask this question. What is it that you would consider a big obstacle that you had to overcome to be successful? Being in Wisconsin, being in Wisconsin? Because you have to you always have to defend and prove the point. And just a quick story. And you I'm sure you will love that my father in law and I used to go to tasting Milwaukee and Chicago and so on trade show, and we would say, oh, would you like to taste a Wisconsin white, people would literally pull the glass out of the way and oh, no, no, it's all sweet. It's all fruit wine. I'm not interested. I knew the wine was the future of the winery. I knew that wine was the winner and one of the best wine around. And so you get hurt, you get slapped in the face. And then so we totally changed our approach. And for about five years, we never even said Wisconsin wine or would you like to taste this wine? Wow, it's so good. We're good friends. Then slowly we were able to...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure and wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: In Part One of our conversation with Philippe of Wollersheim Winery. We learned the winery had been purchased in 1972 and had been struggling until Philippe and his father-in-law came upon an idea. In 1988, I created a wine called Prairie Fume, which is made of Seyval Blanc, custom-grown in New York, a French American hybrid from New York State. We used to grow Sebald here in Wisconsin, but we made a different style of wine with it. So we bought grapes from New York State and came up with a totally different wine, a Pinot Grigio style 30 years ahead of the fashionable Pinot Grigio. We stopped fermentation. That was the first time we did that way back in 87, 88. So natural sweetness, no sugar, light, crisp, 10 percent of alcohol, high acid. And the first year we released that wine, it got four gold medals and it hit the news. When you first tasted it, did you know that? Hey, I've got something here. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because it was intentionally made. It wasn't like, oh, man, by accident. That tastes great. And that the intention was, you know, and I can I can picture myself in 1988 right next to the tank. And my goal was to capture the aromatics of fermentation in a bottle. So was OK, how do I do that? How can I freeze that fragrance? Because put up to this point your whole background and your whole family had let it do its thing and complete the fermentation process. But you want to stop it? Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm used to you know, I'm used to a dry red Beaujolais, fresh, fruity, light, but bold and dry. And here talking this white Seyval Blanc, it was I mean, it was perfume. It was aromatic. It was citrus. It was orange. It was it was so awesome. And so I wanted to capture that. That was my ultimate goal. So with crushin with cold temperature, knocking the yeast out and sulfite killing the yeast, then it was a stable white wine, a German style, let's call it that way, without the thickness of a German white. This one was more Italian Pinot Grigio, crisp, like fresh, fruity and it just it was a big hit. So when you were at that moment when you were tasting it, was there anybody else around or did you just run off and say, you've got to taste this, you got to check it out? My father-in-Law. I mean, we were working closely together. We developed that concept together. But, you know, I mean, just it was I knew it was, you know, deep down we had that secret excitement. It's one competition, a gold medal, second competition, another gold medal. And we never had we never had a successful wine like this ever. You know, I mean, the word got around in Michigan, the word go around in Illinois. The word got around in New York State. The Dallas Morning News wrote a nice article about it because we had gotten a gold medal in California as we as awarded a lot of gold medal to that line. So it it created its own own little interest. And and now this wine is 40,0000 bottles and we run out of it every year. Wow. And your wife probably looked at you and said, finally, I've got something I can market! Exactly. And I said, you know, it's an interesting development in life because without that wine, we really wondered if we were going to go bankrupt. You know, it was, you know, financially, it could not really support two families and and kids. And we were just wondering. And then suddenly I was just like a breath of fresh air. I just like, wow. Oh, that's the story gave me goosebumps. It's Prairie Fume. If you me and what are you doing Philippe? It's only ten dollars a bottle. I don't know. And, you know, it's funny because I was just running yesterday, we had a meeting with an apple...

Welcome, to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is in this episode. We head to the state where the first-ever ice cream sundae was served in 1881. It's home to my favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Nearly all of the ginseng grown in the United States and about 10 percent of the world's supply comes from this state. At one time, Steve Miller called the state home. My name is Philippe Coquard. I'm the owner with my wife, Judy, the winemaker and the president of Watershed Winery Inc. And I've been in America for 38 years. And you still have the accent there heavily. And I don't even hear the Wisconsin accent. No, not quite. But you know what? All the ladies tell me it's super sexy. So you still listen to the ladies? Oh, yeah. We're in France. You originate from. So I grew up in Beaujolais. I am a third-generation winemaker, both sides of my family. I mean, growing grapes and making wine and somewhere around sixteen hundred. Well, that's a pretty good background. That's solid. Yeah, it's, it's in my blood. Sometimes I joke around that I have more wine than blood running through my veins, so. And that would make sense. Says that wine growing region into France. Beaujolais has over 4000 vineyards growing up in Beaujolais. Both of my uncles had wineries. My grandfather worked with them. My father was a vineyard consultant his entire life, so I was in the vineyard since I can remember going to the winery, tasting wine, putting bottles on the bottling line when I was eight years old, picking weeds, picking brush, picking grapes, driving the tractor with my uncles. I took a liking to that. I went to school for winemaking, wine marketing, Bachelor of Science from Mackle Winemaking School in South Burgundy, and then a fresh out of school. My childhood dream was to come to America, so I applied to many different ways and I ended up coming with A Future Farmers of America in 1984, and my father in law picked up my name on the list of interns wanting to come to the US and that's how I ended up in Wisconsin. So then that gets you to America. And then that was eighty-four. So the winery had already been established? Yes, the winery was, let's call it a small place. We were doing eight thousand gallons. Thirty-seven thousand bottles. Some were, some were good, some were okay. Financially difficult, struggling lack of cash flow. In the meantime, as a good Frenchman, I fell in love with the owner's daughter. Got to Judy. My wife was still in college in marketing and business at UW Madison, and then she joined the family business. We were raising a couple of kids, so it was financially it was very difficult. Ok, so in 1972, your in-laws bought the winery. Tell me a little bit about that, Bob and Jillian Wollersheim, both natives of Wisconsin. My father-in-law was an electrical engineer. He put himself through college electrical motor rewinding. My mother and I worked at different banks while my father-in-law was studying and ended up teaching electrical engineering at UW Madison. I ended up working for the Science Center tire of the high-tech world. He was an avid home winemaker, backyard grape grower, knew of this historic winery, and got interested in purchasing the place. And he put a business plan together. Talk to the local bank with whom we still bank bought the property in 1972. The property had been a winery since 1866, closed down after Prohibition became a Wisconsin farm, and then nineteen seventy-two. My in-laws Bob the place restarted everything from scratch without a dime in their pocket. In part two of our interview with Philippe, owner, and winemaker of Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. We learned of a very important discovery in 1988. I created a...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is Ok, Alex. Let's get down to it at Fullarton Wines. Which wine is your most popular? So our Three Otters label is what we make the most of and three quarters Pinot Noir, which is a blend of vineyards from throughout the Willamette Valley. Again, that's our most popular wine. I guess if you look at production and that is something special about us too, is we don't make all the wines the same. We like to optimize each vineyard and we do a lot of different production techniques. We like to experiment. Sometimes the experiments work out and then we move that direction. Sometimes we don't like it as much and move away from that direction. And Three Otters really gets a huge diversity of different things while still maintaining what it is to be a lot of our work, which is a little bit lighter, easy, approachable, but still with lots of flavor, some space and the earthiness and then red tones sometimes leading into a little bit of darkness, but generally a redder aspect to the fruit profile. And that really is what we're going for obviously now. Ok, that's a little different name for wine, even by Oregon standards. So explain that to origin for me. Three Otters that does come from our family crest portion is my last name of Scottish origin, not Scandinavian. And on the old 13th century Scottish family crest for Fullerton and our three little otter heads. So our Three Otters label is named in honor of our family. Your other line is Five Faces. So Five Faces is an acronym for my family. There's five of us and our initial spell F.A.C.E.S. That's my big little brother and was six foot 10. Filip So it's spelled with an F the Scandinavian spelling. And then I'm Alex. My little sister Caroline luckily spelled non Scandinavian, otherwise we would be the F.A.K.E.S. And then Eric and Suzanne, my parents. Are your parents still active in the winery? Yes, we so we started in 2012 and they are the hardest working, hard working people that I know there. Without them, we do not have a thriving wine company. My goal is to give them more free time. As we close out our conversation. Alex, tell me about your tasting rooms and then looking at your website, I see you've been quite active with virtual tasting rooms. Our tasting rooms are all outdoors right now. So we we actually bought gazebos and we are allowed to have three of the parking spots outside of our tasting room, which I should clarify is in downtown Portland. So we're an urban tasting room setting. We do have a little dressing room set up in the winery in Corvallis. If you come to is there, it'll be me or one of my two assistants in the winery.The winery is in Corvallis and that's our old tasting room. That's where I am right now, our our vineyard and our world headquarters. So we've been doing a lot of virtual tastings, which we have. Two main options now is curate yourself, but two options for tastings that will send it out to people and then they can join on as you can go. You have actually quite a lot of success with those people are interactive. I even enjoy hosting them. Well, we're using Google. It's actually let's make sure that we get all of your contact information on the Web and phone numbers. So WWW.fullertonwines.com. If you want to reach out, you can email me at alex@fullertonwines.com or info@fullertonwines.com And if you want a call you can call 503.544.1378 Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest calling. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by I guess if you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time for the line and ponder your next adventure.This...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We continue our conversation with Alex Fullerton of Fullerton Wines in Oregon. What life changing decision happened in 2011?In 2011, we decided to make a garage wine. So unknowingly we were kind of joining a small movement, made a little bit of wine in my dad's one of my dad's best friend's garages/ crawlspaces. My dad and I were kind of gung ho on starting to produce a little bit of wine. So we convinced my mom to start a little wine company in 2011, started producing about 250 cases in 2011, and within a few years, we're producing 5000 cases a year now.Wow, that was a nice start, making wine in a garage/crawl space. And then what happened?The next year, 2012, we started in a co-op winery in Portland where several different winemakers all ran a little sliver of space in this winery. And since then, we've we moved to one winery for one harvest. And after that, we've been sharing an old defunct winery space with another producer. So it's two of us under one roof in a much more harmonized facility with a lot of bells and whistles.Now, the Willamette Valley in Oregon is not just home to 70 percent of the population. So if you picture it, it runs north and south in Oregon and it's 150 miles long, obviously, because of location, the climate is cooler than California. And how does that affect you?Yeah, the growing season is quite a bit shorter. And then I guess I should just say the growing degree days are a lot shorter as well. And that's a measure of accumulation of heat units that the plant can use to grow. The types of grapes that we can consistently ripen in the Willamette Valley are quite different from Napa Valley. We do have quite a diversity of temperatures within the valley, different temperatures and different places as we have for for example, it's really hot here and it's too hot for the really warm sites to express themselves in their best possible way. Then maybe some of our cooler sites will be really, really nice. And then in the cooler years, it can be nice to have some warmer sides to ripen earlier. So you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and having having too cooler year for one vineyard. So that's actually one reason why we really love working with a wide variety of vineyards throughout the Valley.Well, is it true I was reading somewhere that the Willamette Valley is home to some of the best and most expensive Pinot Noir in the world?Yeah, we do. I mean, there are producers now that are that are selling $300 hundred dollar bottles of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, which is definitely a statement, I will say, about just the climate in the Willamette Valley. It's beautiful for growing Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and those many places, many pockets of California that I love and super interesting Canadian Pinot Noir. And I'm very biased when I say this, but my favorite Pinot Noir growing region in North America is the Willamette Valley.Well, I guess this next question would be kind of twofold at Fullarton Wines. How do you feel your wine is unique and what do you believe to be unique about the Willamette Valley? really Well, we always have told people and what you what you can come to our tasting room and experience is the whole Willamette Valley, not just one place within the Willamette Valley, which is very fun to do, tasting one vineyard at one place. We love working with a wide variety of vineyards and then working to showcase what we like about that vineyard will hopefully taste a huge variety within our wines, even though for the most part it's a lot of pinot noir. There are some other varietals growing within the small geographic distance...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past hour at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, we look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike.Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is, oh, you've heard the expression, and the grass is always greener. Well, the grass is always greener in Willamette Valley. It grows more turf and forage grasses than anywhere else in the world. Eric Asimov of The New York Times calls Willamette Valley the country's most exciting wine area. It's a favored destination for whitewater rafting and home to; this is Alex Fullerton of Fullerton wine. I am the co-owner and winemaker. All right, Alex, give us a little history on how Fullerton wine came about. So my dad, his best friend, inherited his grandpa's wine cellar. So he grew up driving down to Burgundy and Bordeaux with old bottles and but mainly his best friend, my godfather, ended up starting a wine importation company in Denmark. I was born in Denmark. My mom is Swedish. My dad was born in California to an American dad and a Danish mom. Long story; my dad kind of got me into wine. So when I was graduating high school, he ended up taking me on a trip to Burgundy Champagne and Cognac. And we picked up one of my best friends from Denmark, him and his dad. We picked them up at the airport drive to Burgundy. I just fell in love with how different the wines were. And all lot of story short, I stood too close to this guy. He had the contagious wine bug. And I caught that since he's a big fan of wine, he kind of shocked me with some more affordable stuff throughout college. So I'm kind of started home brewing, had a little bit of a bootlegging operation going. My roommates and I got into fermentation that way. I was graduating with an Econ degree, was tasting at Penner-Ash and got a job in the wine industry, and just fell in love with everything about the industry.Ok, since you are the winemaker at Fullerton Wines, let's get your degree background. I originally got an economics degree from the University of Oregon.But then I ended up getting a job at Penner-Ash, fell in love with the industry, worked in New Zealand for a bit, worked at Bergström Wines, then ended up deciding to go back to school at Oregon State with a bitter rival. So I'm a rare platypus, which is a beaver and a duck. Then I'm going back to school for viticulture and technology, which is grape growing and winemaking. You've got a huge selection of wines at Fullarton Wines, but which one is your most popular? So are three. Five FACES Pinot Noir, Lux Chardonnay, and The three Otter's Pinot Noir, are a blend of vineyards from throughout the Winery Valley. And that's our most popular wine. I guess if you look at production and that is something special about us too, is we don't make all the wines the same. So we like to optimize each vineyard, and we do a lot of different production techniques with experiments. Sometimes the experiments work out, and then we move in that direction. Sometimes we don't like it as much to move away from that direction. The wines get a huge diversity of different things while still maintaining what it is to be a well, even if you are, which is a little bit lighter, easy, approachable, but still with lots of flavors, some spice, and earthiness, and then red tones sometimes leading into a little bit of darkness, but generally a redder aspect to the fruit profile. And that is what we're going for.Alright, Boys and girls, it’s our listener voicemail, Hi Forrest, this is Brad from North Carolina; my buddies and I are sitting around drinking a couple of boxes of wine. I don't know what the hell kind of unit you're running here. I just want to know why is wine stored on its side? That's a good question, Brad. No, it's not because the wine is tired. For the wine to last, the cork has got to stay moist. So putting it on its side

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.Our featured winery is as we conclude our interview with Ken Schultz of Hidden Legend Winery. We learn where that personality first started that would eventually make award winning Mead.I set out to see things in life a very, very early age. I blame my fifth grade teacher introducing us to National Geographic and I just could not stand it. I was like just fidgeting until I got out of high school and took off. I started as a merchant marine on the Great Lakes and then TWA started offering cheap tickets to Europe back in 69, 70, whenever that was. And I got one. And when I got there, I tore up the return trip and I was just gone four years. I'm not sure how many crowned heads I visited, but I got thirty three countries under my belt.Reading on your website, it says that you were across from Pioneer Log Homes in the Sheafman Plaza in Victor Montana. Tell me about your location. Well, it's a little tiny strip plaza. There's like five businesses in it on the corner. We're actually five miles south. We're right on the border between Victor and Hamilton, but we're five miles south of Main Street, Victor itself, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  So you're not getting a lot of foot traffic. Well, being in a small plaza and having a beverage like a wine like beverage, it's not something that people come in and have three or four glasses of. I keep threatening to put in one of those banks of drawers that the Japanese used for their executive power naps. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that, you know, after three or four glasses of Mead, I can just put you in there and set the timer. We don't have a lot of tasting room traffic. What we do have is wide distribution and Internet sales. We ship to thirty seven states in this pandemic world. It doubled it literally, literally from the middle of March on. If you would look at our warehouse room, our inventory, you would think all kind of Winery insists there's nothing. I'm making it. I'm not making it quite as fast as it's going out the door right now. We have a term for that. We call it full COVID. No, we don't have time to do much other than just try and keep up with the bottling and packaging.And we've recently been out of our two top sellers and just got those back online. And we've got other flavors that we're trying to get back online. We're I think we're down about four flavors right now. Seriously, that four o'clock glass of wine became more than just kicking back. Tell me about your Mead award winners. Well, we most of them have won top awards at one time or another since ninety since the 90s. And we've got some bottles on the top shelf of a display cabinet that pretty much you can't even see the bottles anymore. They're so laden with artwork. We pick on like the Finger Lakes in New York, Tasters Guild in Michigan, The Indie international at Purdue. Out here in Washington, we have the Tri Cities Wine Society and of course, the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition in Broomfield, Colorado. Every year we try and spread it out and get a good overview from reputable judges. It basically keeps me on track. And except for this year, there are usually a dozen shows that I like to go to, anything from Art shows to Highland Games to Renaissance festivals to Pirate festivals. And of course, I don't get to see much of the festivals I'm staying or serving Mead for eight hours a day. But it's fun to dress like a pirate and see everybody happy with my product. All right, Ken, thank you very much. And as we close out, go ahead and give us your Web address on how we can reach out to you. Hiddenlegendwinery.com Well, we do have a Facebook presence. I was in Ireland and I was talking to a...

In a winery, grapes come ripe in the fall. Of course, there are things to do all year, but that's called the crush. They harvest the grapes, they crush them, they press them, they get them in the tanks and they ferment. And then they sit in the tanks for a while. Then they look to finishing the wines and the whites come first and they're usually in the bottle before Christmas. And then the reds sit all winter and they're in the bottle by June. They really only make wine once a year. And that's during the fall. I make wine continuously. I buy honey twelve to thirty thousand pounds at a time and I am continually if I get an empty, empty tank, I fill the tank. That can be a couple of times a month. And so I don't have to once a year look up how I did it last year. What kind of honey are you dealing with in Montana? Oh yeah. We have basically two types here in Montana. We have wildflower honey in western Montana, I should say, up and down the western side of the Great Divide. We have five valleys and there's probably five major producers up, say, half a million pounds a year. Most of it is a wildflower, which used to be before the state declared war on it. Most of it was spotted in. And then there's a fair amount of clover, honey, and we use both. And we have two very distinct styles of meat that we make from each. And the clover honey here is entirely different. I grew up on Clover Honey in Ohio and I thought it was a trap. I hear it's very exciting. The national blenders just take everything they can get their hands on. It poured into a big battle. Honey bears. Oh no, that's hard work. Yeah, that's very easy. You don't hear much out of beekeepers because they're always working. We've all had honey crystalize in the cupboard and then with Montana winters I imagine you get honey in all different varieties of stages and things. How do you deal with that? Montana is second in the nation in honey production. When we get it in the drums, it's rock-solid, it is barely filtered. There are bee parts floating around in there and in raw honey in that sugar is very quickly so you can knock on it. It's like knocking on wood. So the first thing I have to do is put a strap a heater on the drum and raise it. And I do it over a four or five-day period very slowly to about 100 degrees. Let it melt. Now, I really try to be careful with the natural properties of honey. I want it to come through in the mid, whatever those properties may be, magical or medicinal. And both played a big part in historical meat make Out of the whole process. What is your favorite part? I'm going up to the mountain cabin and kicking back in front of the fireplace and having a horn of mead with friends. You say a horn of not Just a horn that fits into advanced meed enthusiasts. Yeah, we import horns from England Cups, mugs, and natural horns, just like in the Thirteenth Warrior or Robin Hood or Game of Thrones. Yeah, two of my three sons are principals in the company and a sort of a half son, a young fellow that we took in at an early age and raised along with our boys, so and my wife. So there are five of us principally. We say you have to be related to work here or somebody else. And it's time, boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi. I was wondering, did anyone besides the Vikings first make mead? At the risk of upsetting a Viking? I would have to say yes, only because Mead is the oldest known alcoholic beverage in world history. However, I would say that the Vikings did enjoy meed the most. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM. If you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time or the wine and ponder your next adventure.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast"...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is so basically I opened the Hidden Legend Winery for at Harvard Business School would call the worst possible reason to open a business, and that's because the neighbors thought it was a good idea.In this episode, we head to the state that has the largest migratory bird in the nation, the only state with a triple divide allowing water to flow into the Pacific, Atlantic and Hudson Bay. We head to Victor, Montana. I'm Ken Shultz and I am the founder and winemaker at Hidden Legend Winery in Victor, Montana. Ok, Ken, let's go back to the beginning. Where did this spark come from? Well, when we were kids, I had an uncle that was a research chemist and a serious hobby winemaker, friends with the head of the technology department at Purdue and various vineyard owners.  And things of that nature in his basement had all the right glassware. It was like Frankenstein's laboratory. So I guess that was the spark. Oh, yeah, that was early. You know, under 13, I turned 21. I was going to school in Lausanne, Switzerland. I worked overseas for a number of years and I came back. I got married when I was twenty three and the very first time I owned a closet I made. Me personally, I've lived all over Montana and I just love the big sky.  But how about, you know, I was still in Ohio when I got married and we came out here, we got married in seventy five, came out to Montana, saw it, fell in love with the place in seventy six and finally moved here in seventy nine. Well my wife is Norwegian and she thought it looked like Norway and because I had worked there I thought it looked like northern Pakistan but no monkeys or water buffalo. There's something captivating about the Bitterroot Mountains.You can look off in the distance and see a whole train. Well, you know, at some point when hiking and fishing and vistas and all of you know, the alluring things of Montana kind of settle down to a little bit.I thought I'd make some wine and evidently I hadn't thought it through very well because there's no grapes. However, I had read The Hobbit and I knew what meat was. And so I came across a bucket of honey that somebody was just disposing of and I thought I'd make mead. I mentioned it to my peers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they were like, oh, my God, can no, don't make me. It's horrible. It's thick. Vikings drank it. You'll give winemakers a bad name. I thought, well, you snob's, I'll show you that I can make a mead every bit as complex as your wines. And so I made mead in the mid eighties. Let me just put it this way. I have a driveway that's a half a mile long, three switchbacks up a mountainside. And the guy that used to keep it clear for me in the wintertime would do it twice for a for a bottle.Ok, let's rewind just a little bit without getting technical, but getting technical just to fill everybody in and be especially neat is often referred to as honey wine, but that's not really accurate. You make the wine with honey water and yeast rather than fruit. So technically meat is kind of in its own category of an alcoholic beverage.Well, the word mead goes way back to the Sanskrit and the word Megu is honey in Sanskrit. And it's where the English word Medo comes from, which doesn't mean field of flowers. It means we're nectars gathered. And so Mead is actually a shortened meadow.Well, I imagine that the chemical process is very similar. You're dealing with sugars, but just different kinds of sugars. So are there some nuances to the whole process?The process is very similar, although we do have to create an environment for the yeast in honey because there's nothing in it but sugar and a grape...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.Our featured winery is we conclude our interview with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. As we've learned in past episodes from Stephen, it's all about making wine to its purest form, and that includes serving local and organic food in their restaurants. And what exactly does local and organic mean, and why is that so important?It's the largest impact on global warming is the food production for the eight billion of us. This business of 30-mile-long, that's a death in the oceans. And the sprays that come over on the jet streams from Asia to North America and the amount of carbon footprint to move all these, you know, thousands of tons of food everywhere. It's got to stop. It's ruining the earth at an astounding rate. If we go back to local and organic, we're going to have a much bigger difference in our breathing the air and keeping the planet alive. One of the biggest things that impacted us is the tractor. By going up and down in the fields, all the topsoil disappeared, and now we have to put chemicals to top topsoil and these pesticides. Already, according to The New York Times, 90 percent of the insects on the planet are gone, including the bees and the butterflies. And these are our pollinators. You know, I can understand why people don't realize that every time they buy something that's not organic, they are contributing to pesticides that are killing our insect. And if we don't have our insects, we are in big trouble in our conversation.Stephen, I could tell that you're very progressive in that you're continually moving forward and trying to perfect whatever process you're in the middle of. But in the upcoming years, what kind of goals do you have?I would say my goal is to get other wineries to convert to organic and other food producers to convert to organic. And I've started a declaration which has a website, organic, Okanogan dot com, organic Okanogan dot com. And you can sign the declaration online. And it's even if you're from California or Brazil or wherever you're from. It shows that you know, we are anxious to be a model and make a model of being organic. So that would be my wish is that our properties with some real property are a model to the world of man and nature and the beautiful wines we produce and also then, you know, the healthy wines that we make. I see the correlation in France, the amount of cancer in children of people living near vineyards there, and their population is so much higher than ours. And I have the link on our website. It's pathetic to see all these children with their hair shaved off, and you see the coffins going down into the earth. Children, you know. For what? For chemical wine. It's ridiculous. I can't believe that one child's life, to me, is worth all the wine in the world.The world is the way it is. And I'm sure I can't change it all in one and one day. But I'm going to try.Well, that's good, because you're trying makes me try. And then collectively, we start to make an impact on this whole thing, start to improve the planet for everybody. All right. As we close it out, let's get all of your contact information, Stephen, and you can contact me, Steve. I'm the proprietor at 250. 764.8000 ext 199 or ext. 11. Our websites are, https://www.summerhill.bc.ca/I also have http://organicokanagan.com/ and http://alloneera.comThat's the precious one that I'm working on with

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past. We look for adventures at wineries around the world. After all, grape minds think alike. Our featured winery is we continue our conversation with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in British Columbia, Canada.Well, we started out of our little garage making wine in 1990, 91, and we introduced the same Strutt in December 91 to right in the beginning in 92 in New York City to great reviews there, as I mentioned. So the official opening is 92, but we've been making wine since the late 80s. You know, we came here in 1986, my family and I from New York for 30 years now. We've just been dedicated to the amazing growing conditions here and the lovely people here. I have to say that British Columbia is a treat to be here. Such lovely, honest, and wonderful people are all around us at all times. Our crew, our employees like family. It's beautiful. A lot of people join Summerhill because they want to. I even get comments like Steve we'd work here for if you didn't pay us.We love this place. There are so few things in this world that give us energy. Most things take energy. Yeah. So that's wonderful.Something we learned in a previous episode was that Steven built a pyramid on the property to incorporate that pyramid into the winemaking process.What I think it is, is sacred geometry is related to the electrical nature of life itself. And it brings out I would say it's not it does not make any liquid worse or better. It clarifies it. So if you put wine in there, for instance, that has flaws in it, it will bring out the flaws and make wine like cooking wine. You can't drink it. And if it has good qualities, it'll bring out good qualities—the same with milk or orange juice or any other liquid. And we've proven that time and time again in the last over 30 years now. And it's very conclusive, and we're very thrilled with the experiments and plan to go on bigger and better and more experiments to prove the value of sacred geometry on liquids. The size of our pyramid would be the exact size of the capstone on the Great Pyramid. Ironically, we didn't plan it that way, but it just happened to come out to be exactly what the size of the capstone on the pyramid would have been—sixty feet square and four stories high. Well, You are one of the most visited wineries in Canada. I imagine that you've got quite a few employees every year. We have about 170 employees in the season, and that drops down to about half of that in the shoulder seasons. But of course, with COVID, we're running way below that because most of the weddings have been canceled, not allowed to have more than 50 people and they have to be six feet apart. And the Chinese tourists that we get every day, busloads of tourists from China are not coming. We're not getting any tourists from the United States. Even our own in Canada are coming much less frequently. So we're way down in and visits this year because of COVID. And yet, interestingly, our sales have gone up incredibly because of the Internet sales, the wonderful online sales have been fantastic. I think we had a fifteen hundred percent increase over the same months last year. So, yeah, people want to buy our wine. That's organic; it's the pyramid, this gold medal-winning, whatever. And they love the wine, so they don't come to see us anymore, whether it's ordering online and we deliver. And a portion of those employees that you just mentioned are working at the website. Your restaurant is just a wonderful restaurant.  Very proud of that. We have a 200 seat organic restaurant and catering. We usually do over 100 weddings a year. So we do a lot of food. We at one time were called by the suppliers, the biggest outlet in all of Kelowna, which is huge. That means all the hotels and all of the big restaurants and everything. We were...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.Our featured winery is; we continue our conversation with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery.  I'm not asking for the secret sauce here. What do you feel attributes to all of the awards that you get for your winemaking?Yes, it's a combination of things that we do. First of all, and most importantly, the grapes are grown organically and biodynamic. And they are processed in a certified organic cellar as well. What does that mean by everything? What does that mean by biodynamic is a term we can use if you get a Demeter certification out of Germany, which is the highest way to get organic certification like it's the biggest test. And everything is done by Rudolf Steiner, who is the founder of Demeter and Biodynamics, really. And he specifies when you can plant by the moon and when you harvest, and you put in making a tea from the right and grapes from last year. Everything is composted, compost, tea, there's a lot of the things that you need to do and be done with your plant is really at the end of the day, it's about nature and communication with man. It's a wonderful man and nature quencher. I call it.Going through those two processes sounds very complex in themselves, let alone having to do two of those. And yet you decided to add another element to try to raise wine to its highest form.And we took it to another process as well. And we built a sacred geometry chamber to put the wines in for the marriage period from dosaging to going on to the shelf. So when you make sparkling wine, as most people do know, you make a base wine like any other wine, and then you put that base one in a bottle that has a stick and can handle the pressure, and you add yeast and sugar and represent it in that bottle again, and it lays on the dead yeast cells. You sell the leaves for 18 months to 15 years. And each year, depending on what kind of grapes you have it made out of, produces more of the subtle flavors and nuances that you get out of fine sparkling wine. And then you wake up the bottle by riddling it and getting the dead yeast cells out of it. And then you dosage it with a sweet little reserve because the yeast has eaten all of the sugar. So its own dry and most people can handle it that way. And then the dosage period is what we call the marriage period. And in Europe, in Germany and Spain and France, many places where they make sparkling wine, they put the bottles in a sacred geometry chamber, which in those areas is almost always a Roman arch cellar. n Spain has, I think, 30 miles of Roman cellars to house their bottles after they've been discharged. And we built a precision pyramid after the Great Pyramid in Egypt to several trips that I was privileged to make with Egyptologists, then John Anthony West. So we did a precision pyramid, and we put all our wines now into that pyramid, which makes them again with a tiny winery, we're only 30,000 cases a year, and yet we win a huge amount of awards every year with our people. Love the flavors at the organic wine, and the pyramid adds a dimension to it as well.Well, listening to the details that you put into every single process of what you do, I can...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure.Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is; in today's episode. We head to the land of hockey, maple syrup, brutally cold winters. Butter Tarts, Duncker Roos, of course. Drake, Tim Hortons. Canada's most visited and largest organic winery, Summerhill Pyramid Winery, Stephen Cipes with a PH and the proprietor and founder of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia.Ok, enough of the kidding around. Let's get down to the wonderful story of Summerhill Pyramid Winery. Stephen, your accomplishments would fill a New York City phone book. But let's start back at the beginning. Where did all of this being in connection with the Earth of the land and begin?  It goes back to my childhood. I love growing things and being in the soil and being outdoors and climbing trees a little. As a little boy, I've always been an outdoor kid and I, you know, got involved in real estate development in a way that would save the wetlands and the and the steep slopes and very involved in early in the 60s, 60s hippie, if you will, out there protesting the way people built things. I was one of the founders of why environmental rules are so strict today, why they can't just fill in wetlands and stuff like that was my original push in New York, which was a big suburb of Manhattan. Feel like I am part of the Earth, and I wanted to get closer and brought my little family of four little boys and my wife Wendy at the time. And we came up here and bought a little vineyard, and Kelowna had to take out almost all of the vines. There were grapevines that weren't really good for making wine. They were for table grapes and for hybrid grapes and things like that. And I went to France, bought some clones there that were making the finest sparkling wine in the world because I got an inspiration here that we had the ideal climate to make sparkling wine very exciting. You know, sparkling wine is made all over the world. But it's most famous, of course, in Champagne. Sparkling wine is the same thing as Champagne. It's just. Yeah, if it's not from Champagne, it can't be called Champagne.That's correct. Especially if you make it in the traditional way, which is to use the three grapes that you must use in Champagne in order for it to be called Champagne, which is Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, in any given amount, you can even have a two percent Monet doesn't matter as long as you have all three here. We don't call it Champagne because we're not allowed to in a strictly enforce that. But we actually won the most prestigious award in the world in France, the best sparkling wine in the world. They couldn't believe it from a little place in an unknown wine region like Kelowna, British Columbia. Who would have thunk it? Those are the vines that you when you went to France. Yes. One of the biggest reasons is that if you have intensely flavored grapes, they will hold their flavor through the second fermentation in the bottle. And we here in the Okanagan have a very dry climate. It's called a semi-desert. And this low rainfall as we growers keep the irrigation down off really, and we get these intensely flavored grapes that make the best wine that will hold the flavor through the second fermentation in the bottle. And that's just been winning awards all over the world. In fact, when we first introduced our Sipes brewed in New York, where I'm from, I got rave reviews in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And oh gosh, it was a hit, and it was all sold out here at home because we got such great notoriety in New York.And the awards just keep coming. I understand you are home to the most awarded wine in Canada.Yes, we also have an abundance of...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. We wrap up our conversation with Bob Wickizer of Pecan Creek Winery, Muskogee, Oklahoma.OK, Bob, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. How many labels do you have?We actually have 20 labels. There are dry and sweet labels. And there are there's only two that are not from grapes or products that we get locally. We started. Everybody in the world wants cabernet sauvignon. Cab is hard to get, and frankly, it's hard to grow here. We do grow some, and we have a limited production right now. We did win bronze at San Francisco Chronicle for a couple of years ago. So I start getting nice source grapes from Lodi originally and now from Washington State. We make one line called Purple Martin. That's grapes that are not local, but it's a pretty darn good wine. And we also buy some mead from a Missouri mediary, and we add about five percent of one of our white wines to it to give it a little more acid and balance it up. And those are the only two at either end of the spectrum that we don't source and make entirely locally. So hypothetically, Bob, if a vineyard from California ever said you couldn't compete with what we produce here in California, what would you say?I still do say that any idiot can make good wine from West Coast fruit. But if you want a real challenge, you want to come out here, try it. The UC Davis field book for all the pests and bugs and viruses and bacteria and molds that affect wine is about 30 pages long. And the Oklahoma State University field book is about 200 pages. We have more things to worry about here than a grape grower in California would ever even dream about in their worst nightmares. And then we have the weather. Of course, you know, it was our meteorological data of last freezes, supposedly April 15th tax date. But April twenty-sixth this year, we had twenty-five degrees for four hours. And our Vitis vinifera plants especially, we're pushing out shoots about two, three, four inches long and they just turned brown and fell off. It was like, oh my gosh. But, you know, you never worry about a freeze, especially. And after your butt out started pushing out chutes, that's unheard of in most grape-growing regions. So, you know, we have that, and we have ridiculously humid hot summers. So the difference between the day and nighttime temperature, it can be 30 or 40 degrees in California, nighttime. Sometimes it doesn't cool off below 80 degrees. It's hard for the vines to rest metabolically. That's one of the reasons why our sugar levels are not as high as they get in California, but our acid levels tend to be very good. I personally do not like high alcohol wines, anyway. I prefer 12 to 13, maybe 13, four percent above. Thankfully, we can't grow alcohol here, so we take what we can get. We're having fun, and we're kind of the contrarian's. My partner, Dr. Wilkinson, and our vineyard manager Gary Ketchum is just fabulous at managing the vineyard.And finally, Bob, because you take such great...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is, we continue our conversation with Bob Wickizer owner-operator of Pecan Creek Winery in Muskogee, Oklahoma. How do we get to your place? Well, first of all, you come down, I think one of the bumpiest roads on the planet, outside of the roads in the rainforest in Costa Rica. Once you've managed to traverse three or four miles of you, first see the vineyard on my partner's ranch. And a lot of people want to turn in there. But there are signs that say wineries another mile. We have about two or three hundred grapevines, cab, and Tempranillo around the winery. But the big vineyards down the road, the winery is in a 5000 square foot converted garage. I proudly tell the story of the origin of the word and the wine industry, Garagistes, it's a French or Italian word literally means someone who works in a garage like a mechanic. Then the big wineries picked it up to disparage the up-and-coming young winemakers who were, you know, they couldn't afford the Chateau and Napa or wherever. So they get a car garage, start making wine in it. So the Garagistes was originally a derogatory term. And lo and behold, over the last 10 or 20 years, people are paying attention. These small, artisanal wineries are making some pretty darn good stuff. And it might be worth visiting the small guys next time you go to Paso Robles and then then the giant places. And we're one of those. So we're proudly one of the Garagistes. We make wine in a car garage. Gosh, it was six bays or a couple of brothers and a big body shop in the back. And so they kept their high-end race cars, and they actually had a John Deere antique tractor collection as well in the garage where a winery is. So you'll see it, a nondescript metal building with a red door for the tasting room. And eventually, we're going to get our name on the building. But there's a sign out front on the road. But that's where we are for now. I mean, if we're in wildly successful days, we could move over to the farm next to the vineyard. And we've got some really cool space over there that would be great to expand into. But we just have to run the business conservatively and make it all work.So when you started the winery, were you at all hesitant about whether it would work in your climates and your soil? They say if it grows peaches, it'll grow grapes. And where our vineyard is part of a former six hundred acre ranch. Our consultant came out there that first day, and we said, well, meet us in the peach farm.  And he said, oh, you won't even need it to get soil samples. If you had peach trees here. You're good to go. We took soil samples anyway, but you'll see that like the Palisades in California, I think there are some vineyards in South Africa like that where you'll see vineyards and peach orchards next to each other. So there's something about that. I guess the conditions are comparable, were favorable for both. We have a great site for a vineyard, and we grow about 30 percent of our production is hybrids.It's time, boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Judy from North Carolina. How do you choose the right wine glass? Me personally, I don't even use a glass. I just drink straight from the bottle. But if you're going to be sophisticated, you want a wide glass for reds, narrow for whites, tall, narrow flute style for sparkling. Thank you for your question, Judy. I'll get your free T-shirt out to you as soon as possible. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show, tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure—our featured winery in this episode. We head to Oklahoma City, where the average commute time is 17 minutes. Not bad considering mine is an hour and a half. The average household size is two. Median family income forty-seven thousand. Yes. Carrie Underwood was born here talking about Muskogee, Oklahoma, also home to: I'm Bob Wickizer. I am the winemaker and co-owner of Pecan Creek Winery in Muskogee, Oklahoma.Glad to be here. How did you get to this point where you started Pecan Winery? Well, wasn't that the Grateful Dead? Who's saying about what a long, strange trip it's been? My resumé and in brief ranges from being a physicist and medical imaging and starting and selling to companies, software companies, and Silicon Valley to firms. And that's where I learned winemaking and wine appreciation wine pairing; after a number of years and three years of commuting to Asia for a semiconductor project, I went to seminary in Cambridge, Mass. Became an ordained Episcopal priest, was up and down the East Coast in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral for a year. And then I got tired of that and wanted to be under the radar. So I've been in Muskogee, Oklahoma, for about ten years. I would get frozen grapes and make wine as kind of a hobby. And a member of the community says, gosh, you got to do something with that. Well, we partnered up, and he's the farmer. I'm the winemaker with that background.Bob, I imagine that you get pretty adventurous sometimes in winemaking.I have made a little bit of wine from concentrates just to see what it's like in general. We do not use concentrate except in two parts of the production process. And by the way, those are completely legal in France and California. One is chaptalization, when in fermentation, and we may use the grape concentrate to boost our sugar level up one or two bricks just to get a desired final alcohol concentration. And we may also use grape concentrate in the final sweetening back sweetening of the wine to produce a sweeter wine outside of that. No, there's no concentrate in this process at all.In the wine business, your job can be varied. Is there such a thing as a typical day for you?I wouldn't know. Typical if it hit me between the eyes. But a lot of times, I'm still the rector of an Episcopal church. Now we have virtual services and all that stuff besides writing and producing services. Every week I have three or four other articles I write online. And we're the only Episcopal Church in Muskogee. But I'm right church stuff for three or four hours, between four-thirty each, starting about four, 30, or five in the morning. And then myself, crew, I'll get something to eat some coffee myself. Our crew gets in about 9:00 every Monday. They have one or two pages of a detailed list of what to do. And I go over every day for about 45 minutes or just to clarify and answer questions and occasionally do calculations.I get an aside, being a physicist, I'm astonished at the lack of math skills in the general population.So I'm doing all the dosing calculations and transfer calculations and filtering determination's stuff like that. So any problems need to get resolved. I may do them in the morning, or I'll go back to church or stay home, one of those three, and then the winemaking duties.Besides that, it also amounts to managing sales, managing finance, purchasing department. I thought the other day; I counted up 17 hats I wear.So it's a good thing, too, because I don't have any hair all its time—boys and Girls for our listener voicemail.Hi, this

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. We finished our last episode with Angela from Prairie Berry Winery talking about their wine club and it's one of the biggest wine clubs in the United States. How big is it?So we have one of the largest wine clubs in the country. We have about 5000 wine club members from across the United States. We ship our wines four times a year to our members and then they enjoy other benefits, such as events and discounts and shipping perks and our wine clubs called Gen five. So it's a play on Generation five, which, as I mentioned before, is the fifth generation winemaker. I've never seen anything like it. When our guests come in this summer and they try our wines, most often they live outside of the region. They want to continue that relationship with us in the Black Hills. And then you go to the wine club information and you can enroll right online or you can call any of our wine club concierge and I can walk you through the enrollment process. But it's pretty simple. You just tell us what kind of wine you want to get. We do a mix, so that would be a dry and sweet wine. Or you can choose all the sweet. And then we include a beautiful newsletter that includes recipes and information about wine and some fun stories and tidbits from the company.I must say, I'm very impressed to look at the statistics of visitorship to Mount Rushmore and the visitors that you get at Prairie Berry Winery. They're very close. So pretty much everybody who goes to the park is also stopping by to see what you have to offer. Right. Yeah, You can't have one without the other. Right. The marketing campaign for this summer is actually South Dakota, home of red ass rhubarb and Mount Rushmore, where you take the lead on our campaign this summer. So your winery is just not about Red Ass Rhubarb wine. It's not just to fruit wines. You have a very large variety. Most people are eager and excited. They've seen our billboards. They've seen, you know, our social media. And so they have an idea of what to expect. But I think lots of people are pleasantly surprised when they try. You know, a wine, native rhubarb, or a wine native blackcurrants. We have a pumpkin wine. So I think the eye-opening experience for some who will maybe never experienced a fruit wine. We do also make great lines. You know, your traditional European style cabernet is in and things of that nature. So we have something for everybody. We are definitely proud of the fruit wines we make. And I like to surprise people who maybe have a preconceived notion of what a fruit, fruit wine is like. You know, based on either their family tradition or other wine experiences they might have had. Our Anna Pesa line is made kind of as a nod to that heritage from Eastern Europe. So those are going to be a more traditional style wine. You know, your drier reds and whites and some common grapes that you might recognize, such as Marleau, for example. But some other more Eastern European grapes that maybe people aren't always quite familiar with, like blouse franc issues is a great dry red wine that we make for the and a line. It's just a delight. Okay. As we conclude part three of our adventure to Prarie Berry Winery in Hill City, South Dakota. Let's get all your contact info.Our Web site is PrairieBerry.com. And our phone number is 605.574.3898. And you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter if you follow Prairie Berry.Will, somebody answer that phone? Its time, boys, and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Janet from New Mexico. I am not much of a wine drinker, but some of my friends are. So what would be a good way to start with?Thank you for your question, Janet. Surely can't be serious. I have...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.Our featured winery is, we continue our conversation with Angela of Prairie Berry Winery in Hill City, South Dakota. So we’ve won over a thousand international awards for our wine. When I tell people that sometimes, you know, they look at our labels are very whimsical and attractive, people enjoy the artwork on our labels. Right. And so when I tell them about the awards that we won, for example, for our flagship wine Red Ass Rhubarb, they’ll say, oh, it’s the name, but wine competitions are blind. So the judges don’t know what they’re tasting, speaks for itself. Okay. I would be remiss if I don’t ask about your most awarded wine and how you came about the name.Ralph, our winemaker’s dad was helping Sandy out of the winery one day with wine back then that we called it, Razzy Rhubarb wine. So the story goes that his face turned red. He felt like an ass for messing up the wine. And so the wine became red as rhubarb and then we added a donkey to the label. And it’s our most famous line now, our most award-winning wine. It’s a fine wine. It’s 90 percent rhubarb and 10 percent raspberry. It’s quite lovely. So Hill City, where the winery is located, I see where the population is just under a thousand people. So doesn’t necessarily reflect on how many visitors you get your winery per year.  Doesn’t know our hill city communities are great and they support us very much. But being in the Black Hills of South Dakota, not too far from Mount Rushmore, it’s a very popular tourist destination. So our door count, the number of people and guests we welcome into our winery each year is generally around one hundred and fifty thousand people that come and visit us. We’re happy to welcome them when they’re out visiting Mt. Rushmore, touring Deadwood, and looking at the Web sites. Your complex just looks huge. So I imagine the two you’ve got guests when they come that they’re just not staying for wine tasting. They’re doing a multitude of things. We have not only very, very winery, but right next door. In 2013, we opened a miner brewing company. So a craft brewery, Sandy void, our winemakers, actually our brewmaster as well. She’s a woman of many talents. We also have an event center on-site where we host parties and weddings, reunions, things of that nature. And then we have a concert at normal times. Every summer we’d be hosting outdoor concerts. We have a basketball court, long games. So we really encourage our guests to join us for more than a wine tasting and spend an afternoon having lunch with us or enjoying some live music, having a pint of beer so you can really make a day of it. And I love it to the tune. Kind of a holistic approach at the winery because it’s just not about wine. You’re also helping with the community, with the farmer’s market. We do. We hosted a farmer’s market every Tuesday morning. It is a community’s farmer’s market and we just welcome them to our station and help promote it. And so that’s great for the community. The locals, as well as the tourists, have fresh produce once a week and in our area. Yeah. Yeah. Local farmers. Local growers. Yeah. You can pick up fresh meat at a farmer’s market in South Dakota. Nothing wrong with a big scoop of Midwestern charm. You sound very proud to work at Prairie Brewery. Have you been there long? Yeah, it’s been really amazing to see. I started as a tasting room associate. Just doing wine...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.Our featured winery is: We venture to Hill City, South Dakota. The oldest existing city in Pennington County. A 15-minute mule ride from Mount Rushmore. And about 70 miles from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, which is the geographic center of the United States. Hi, this is Angela from Prairie Berry Winery. I am the director of sales and marketing. Hello, Angela. I’ve heard of a Rocky Mountain oyster, but what is a prairie berry? It came from our winemaker, Sandy Vojta as a family heritage, actually in the late eighteen hundreds, her family, who came making wine in Europe, emigrated to the plains of South Dakota when they got here. There wasn’t much to make wine from. Obviously no grapes, things of that nature. So her great great grandmother. Her name was Anna Pesä. She started picking berries and chokecherries and buffalo berries, anything that she could find on the prairie of South Dakota. And she would refer to them as prairie berries. That story has been passed down for five generations and the winemaking tradition. And so when Sandy and her father and husband decided to start this business, it was easy to decide on the name. Prairie Berry Winery. And Anna Pesä comes here from Europe. What time frame in American history are we talking about? 1876. That was about the time in South Dakota with Deadwood was coming up in Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. And they happened to immigrate to the northern north-central plains of South Dakota, near Mobridge. Today’s what some Mobridge, South Dakota, not far from there. So 1876, Was she doing this for commercial reasons or just doing it because of what they did in her heritage to do it for themselves? Certainly, it was the tradition the women in the family would make the wine, course in the cold plains of South Dakota. That’s probably something they wanted to do to continue. Her husband would go down to the banks of the Missouri River and cut down oak trees, actually, and make her wine barrels so that she could continue producing wine just for the family. So your winemakers Sandy is a fifth-generation winemaker and she picked it up from her father, Ralph. Tell me about that. So he was making wine in his basement in Mobridge, South Dakota, long before the winery started. And she was a young girl learning, learning the ways. And it just became a passion for her and her and her husband, Matt, and Ralph. Her dad decided in the late 1990s it was time to make it real and start an wine actual business with it. We just celebrated our 20th anniversary as a winery. Last year, 1999 was our first vintage and so to speak, of wine. Now, 20 years later, we are one of the most award-winning wineries in the region. So we’ve won over a thousand international awards for our wine. That concludes part one of our interview with Angela from Prairie Brewery Winery. In our...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines. So having strict guidelines for your wine, how did you come up with the wineries? How did you select them? Because you just can’t go to Google and find these wineries. In the natural wine business. There are very specific subsections of the wine industry. It’s tiny, very, very small. And so everybody basically knows everyone else. There are natural wine fairs, about 50 of them. There are three in the United States, but there is about 50 across Europe. And so we attend all of these natural wine fairs. We’re not right now, but historically we have. Now, today, we’re the largest buyer and seller of natural wines in the world by multiple of probably 25 X, maybe more than that. So we’re internationally known, you know, as a buyer. Now, in the beginning, when I started the company, there were probably about 40 natural wine importers in the United States, meaning that all they sell are natural wine. Like in San Francisco. There are two natural wine bars I’m sorry, three now. They’re just activists. Right. Like, you just wouldn’t have a non-natural wine in there. It’s just not it’s a it’s a revolution. There are three, arguably only three natural wine retailers in San Francisco. Right. And they’re very small stores. So in the beginning, you know, I started reaching out to natural wine importers. I discovered this importer in Paris and American his name’s Josh Adler, who used to live in San Francisco and he moved to Paris and he started a national wine importing company into the United States. And he was the first one that discovered he owns a company called Paris Wine Company. We’re probably his largest customer today, I would imagine. But we do a lot of business with them. But in the beginning, I contacted him to learn about sort of the natural wine world. I began to uncover and discover people and get referred to other importers who specialize in natural wines. Now, today, we’re the largest importer of natural wines in the world. So we still work with about 80 importers today. But we also import directly our own wines. And we do that. We have normally this time of year, we would have four to six people on the ground spread across Europe right now, buying wines that normally we would spend the first six months of the year in Europe buying wines.So you’ve got the sourcing figured out. So now comes the part on what to present to the customer, right? Well, we don’t sell wine by the bottle. We do custom curation for people. So. So every single box that our member gets is different and has different wines. And oh,...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. We go on a different journey. We don’t drop into a specific winery.We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for use in winemaking. Four of them are quite toxic. The most toxic is Dimethyl dicarbonate marketed under the brand name Velcorin. And it’s used to treat Brettanomyces, which is the most common bacterial fault and why it’s highly toxic. If you go to Dimethyl dicarbonate on Wikipedia, you’ll see how toxic it is. Okay, I did look it up on Wikipedia Dimethyl dicarbonate. It is classified as toxic. The first warning is harmful if swallowed. It’s also toxic by inhalation. It causes burns. Well, that’s not really something that you want to be ingesting, especially if you’re going to be drinking it over a lifetime. Now, the public doesn’t know about these additives some and in fairness some are natural. Many are not. The wine industry spends millions of dollars a year and lobby money to keep content labeling and nutritional information off of wine labels. So you don’t have any idea how much sugar is in the wine you’re drinking. To people who care about their health sugar is a very important thing they want to know about. So our job is education. The wine sells itself. Now, that brings up the question. Dryfarmwines.com because of these strict guidelines. Why don’t you carry any domestic wines? The reason being is that there are not really any U.S. wines that meet our criteria. And so you talk about U.S. wines. There are a number of difficult criteria for them to meet. And they’re in the order of dry farming. So almost all domestic vineyards are irrigated. Number two, alcohol. We don’t accept any alcohol over twelve and a half percent. And that’s lab tested by us. Alcohol stated on a wine bottle is not required by law to be accurate. So we did lab testing for alcohol. So there are virtually no U.S. wines made that are twelve and a half percent or lower in alcohol. Virtually none. And then the third most prevalent reason that a U.S. wine wouldn’t qualify for our program is cost. So all of our wines sell for exactly the same amount. They’re $22.00 a bottle. There are no U.S. wines that meet our criteria of organic or biodynamic dry farming and alcohol that cost anywhere close to $22.00. The primary driver on a domestic wine price is going to be the cost of the land. All of U. S. vineyard costs are just so much higher than the capital cost of land in Europe and places like Beaujolais, where anywhere across Europe where most of these small family farms that produce natural wines that we buy wine from, most of them are multigenerational landowners, that they don’t have any capital costs.We’re constantly being told to hydrate, drink more water. That philosophy does not transfer to grapevines. There are a lot of reasons not to irrigate a grapevine. And in most of Europe, it’s against the law to irrigate...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. We go on a different journey. We don’t drop into a specific winery.We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.Yes. Dryfarmwines.com. The only health-focused natural wine club in the world. We’ll get into the intricacies a little bit later. But first, let’s get where the inspiration came from.Well, Dry Farm Wines was not intended to be a business in the beginning. So I do remember a specific inspiration that was a specific wine like a Pinot Noir from Mosel, Germany, that I was drinking at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. That led me to the exceptionally inspired by natural wines. So I wasn’t thinking of Dry Farm Wines as a business at that time. I was just had discovered quite by accident the remarkable taste and texture of natural wines. And as a result, that kind of started me down the path of investigating natural wines and at a deeper level, which eventually led to the business.Okay. Before your mind gets too far down the road of traditional wine thinking.The first thought from Todd is we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. This is a health food company first. So the second point is less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced.Why do you let your mind marinate around those two thoughts? Todd continues to educate us on the philosophy of the company.Well, I mean, nobody. We created the category of healthy wines and sort of branded, as we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. So we just happened to sell wine, have healthy food. So no one had really captured lab testing and quantifying wine around health quantifications. So we were the first to do it. Really were the only one to do it even today. As a result, when we started educating people on what’s really in commercial wines, not just organic wines. So organic is a farming method. You can have organic wines, but they’re not natural. Natural wine is a very specific protocol and category. And it’s very rare. Less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced. So natural wine is a very specific category that has a very clear and specific understanding around the world for people who are in the natural wine business. We just happen to be in the right place at the right time in trying to solve a problem from ourselves. I wanted to drink healthier, lower alcohol wines that were sugar-free and met other criteria that were of interest to me. It turns out that the same concept was of interest to a lot of other wine drinkers. And so it’s always been my feeling that regular wine drinkers, meaning that people who drink daily as I do, people who drink wine every evening, most of them think they probably drink too much. Right. And so offering them a lower alcohol alternative that’s also natural and sugar-free, which is of interest to our customers. There just wasn’t any offer out there in the marketplace that did so, combining that with a long <a...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.We continue our conversation with Tina Post of Post Winery and Altus, Arkansas, as she explains the depths they go to ensure quality control.We take care of our vineyards and we harvest. We haul that. We bring it to the winery, which it’s just six miles away, which is really nice for the assurance of fruit quality. And then we process it. We package it. We develop the package. And we distribute to at four different levels. We know we work with brokers. We work in different states. We what we are our distributor. We also do retail. So we’re a business. And I think this is just wonderful. It makes it really interesting always to that take something from the ground to the table. And usually, that’s not the case. You’re one part of that, you know, in the process. But we literally do it from the ground to the table. You know, we built a distribution center that’s temperature controlled. We use the same refrigeration that we use for our cold fermentation tanks and our distribution centers. So everything is controlled. And, you know, with wine, that’s a big thing. You need sterile filtering. You need you know, we do liquid nitrogen drip on the line to everything to try and ensure the quality and the end being shelf-stable. You know, back in the 60s, it was very different. We had a bunch of wooden tanks and I hope over the years now we use wooden stays or wood chips for some of the things that, you know, everything’s stainless steel cold fermentation. Do you either evolve or you won’t get shelf space anymore? There’s too much competition to not make a good shelf, stable wine.I can’t imagine that it’s an easy task. Running a winery, the size of yours, and the diversity that you have. So as a business, I’m sure you’re always looking to pivot to something new or changing, I think is the business.Any business you always have to be reinventing yourself because the markets changed. You know, a couple of years ago for us in Arkansas, we had small farm winery laws and now we it’s opened up to national brands. That competition got fierce. It’s you know before it was a little easier because only small farm wineries could sell in your convenience stores chain accounts. And now it’s opened that. And so the competition is really fierce.We’ll take a short break. And when we come back, Tina will tell us what Post Winery is working on for the future need to satisfy a hungry mind.Every week,  Your Brain on Facts brings you science. Why does Mint feel cold? History. King Charles. The 2nd of Spain was so inbred his family didn’t bother educating him music. Many hit songs and even entire albums were written for revenge technology. The first videogame was made on an oscilloscope in 1958 and every other topic under the sun. Look for your brain on facts, on your favorite podcast app or at <a href="http://yourbrainonfacts.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.Our featured winery is as continue our conversation with Tina Post of Post Winery and Altus, Arkansas. So since you are one of the biggest wineries in the United States, just a rough estimate, how many people have you got coming through your establishment?Oh, gosh. We have about oh, I would say 50,000 a year in retail maybe. But we are also the largest producer in Arkansas. We are as far as size, you know, where you could put all the other wineries here together and that be about not even half of what we produce. So as far as just getting an idea, I guess size, but yeah, it’s impressive.So to paint a picture when you come into the parking lot. What do we see?We have a retail outlet where you can take tours, do tastings, eat and the Trellis room. And just, you know, we have a gift shop in there and around the retail, we have a picnic area. And then around it, it’s kind of work into our beds around the winery, which we have. We grow everything from cucumbers and tomatoes to all the herbs we use in the kitchen. There are places to run the dogs and stretch your legs. We also in our south part of the parking lot we have Harvest’s House members that come in they can stay overnight.Staying overnight is obviously an added bonus if you fully engulf yourself in your experience of going through everything that you’ve got at the time that we’re recording this. We’re in the middle of the Covid -19 pandemic. And I’m just guessing that to your winery is closed as well.Yes, we have. In fact, I’m we’re just literally trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be. And then when you ask the question, what do you see? And, you know, I was. Well, that’s what you’re going to see as far as what we’re going to be able to do. That’s really up in the air, like taking a tour through the facility. Do we have everybody in a mask which our tours are really fun because they’re a basic winemaking tour and you get to see if we’re crushing that day. You get to watch a crash. If we’re bottling, you get to watch that. It’s so it’s really an interesting tour. It’s like winemaking one-to-one. And a lot of people really appreciate getting to see the distribution center and see how that works. Education is a potent part of what we do, whether it’s about wines behind the tasting bar or just about the whole process and how nature works. You know, the different seasons. That’s one thing people do like. They’ll say, you know where the grapes. But sometimes they say that in the middle of the winter, which is kind of interesting.So to get people, you know, this is how it works. This is how the process works and, you know, getting people back connected to the dirt, to the land, because at the end of the day, we’re farmers first to winemakers and we’re actually a winery who that actually produces are even we make cuttings. We make cuttings. And so we plant the grapes. We take cuttings from the vines because to propagate grapes you have you don’t do it from a seed. You don’t know what you get. So you do it from the wood of the vine that you want to propagate. So we make cuttings and it’s just pieces of that by. We cut and we propagate from that. And we...

Post WineryWelcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. Our featured winery in this episode is Post Winery.We head to the state that ranks number one in rice and poultry production. My wife’s favorite author, John Grisham is from the state. The state’s musical instrument is the fiddle.You’ve got to have a fiddle in the band. What was that? You’ve got to have a fiddle in the band. Thank you, Alabama. No, we’re not talking about Alabama.We’re talking about the only state that produces diamonds.Arkansas is home to Post Winery, it is the largest winery in this region. It is in the top 60 as far as size goes in the United States. We produce about 268,000 gallons of wine and juice every year. My name is Tina Post and I’m one of the fifth-generation family members working here at Post. We wear several hats. Mine is managing the retail and gift shop. The Trellis Room which is our farm to table food program. I do H.R. and things like cultivating our garden for our restaurant. We’re located in northwest Arkansas really at the base of the Boston mountains Altus.Arkansas is the site and because of where it’s located it offers some unique growing capabilities.We actually have a recognized as a viticulture area. It’s called Altus the outer sort of cultural area and we grow 5 different species of grapes which is very unique and I think America to grow those commercially. We’re kind of where the North meets the South and the East meets the West potentially. We have the beta Spanish fruit. Like your Chardonnay and Zinfandel. Labrusca like the Niagara Delaware Concord of course falls into that category. French hybrids like save all the doll and yellow beta festivals which is the Cynthia and the great. It’s also known as Norton if you go into Missouri and they’ll call it Norton and beat us pretend to follow which are the mascot eyes. This is as far north as it grows commercially Altus, Arkansas.So out of those 5 varieties that you mentioned do you have a favorite?Yes. The muscadine line it’s a flagship great for us. It’s a thick-skinned grape that hangs in clusters as opposed to bunches and it is indigenous to North America. And it only grows below the <a...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. I’m the owner Frédéric Bouché and the winemaker of Ports of New York Winery. Welcome to Part 3 of our conversation with Frédéric Bouché. Can’t wait to get into it. So many fascinating stories with Mr. Bouche. Imagined having a winery with your style and the way that you’re so personable that you hear some interesting stories from your patrons had something to do.I mean, the winery there is because we make fortified wines and expands. Not that long ago, that was beautiful fast. I had a group of Indians from India and they were all scoters. Only one of them did not speak English at all. And as we were talking about various types of fortified wines, I was using the term Madeira, which is also Portuguese. That person wouldn’t even speak English. I actually picked up on that word and get some saying it over and over again. So I asked the other guests. How come that person doesn’t speak English? Clearly knows that word. Well, this was because Madeira is the word in overdo. That means alcohol.And that opens a completely incredible page of each story. In fact, the Portuguese have been bringing Madeira to exchange for spices.And so it ended up being that they adopted that word Madeira to mean alcohol because, again, it’s not for this alcohol. So I understand that you do not have a vineyard on sites. You do not grow your own grapes. But this isn’t something that is new to you. This goes back a long way. The winery I grew up in, our vineyards were not on site. They were in the fall of the region, which we get them until the late 70s, early in the family. But the winery was the main building where I grew up was no more. So I don’t want to deal with going great. It’s a whole other job. So we are in the middle of it. They got along the water and it’s an open winery, one of the very first one in New York. So it was very challenging as far as laws and everything to make that happen. Well, I should mention something else, actually. We pre-buy our grapes by the ton without knowing what the harvest is, somebody quality. So in a sense, it’s as if we were growing old grape. But the final product is whatever nature is going to bring us. We’re going to deal with it. And it is truly a very different thing to own, to make the wine. Then two on top of it has to deal with a farm.Let me see if I can get the timeline correct, you arrived in Ithaca, New York in about 1994. The thought of the winery, things started marinating, and then in 2003, there were some new laws are going to be put into effect that would affect your plans built on the land. You put the buildings up, the lights on, and you got to the equipment and everything was finished in 2006. And then four years later, you opened in 2010 and you started making the ports because that takes what you were telling me, a four-year minimum. So from 1990 forward to 2010, almost 16 years, you poured your money into this, so. Yeah. You’ve got to have some money if you want to start a wine business.I always say to everybody, I go, you have a lot of money. Keep your job. And that’s exactly what we did. We stayed really tight to focus and invested in the know at all in this whole thing and very carefully.I mentioned this

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.**Our featured winery is Ports of New York as we continue our conversation with Frédéric Bouché Ports of New York, owner-operator.And then what happened is that my wife and I moved to the Finger Lakes region in 94 because she got a position at Cornell University and was to join the region. So it was kind of ironic after all the years that I was away from it, I fell back into it. And so I built a lot of issues and a lot of antiques and stuff from science here. And that’s one thing that we all for this completely unusual is that I was facing some kind of a little museum of French wine equipment.So in between, that’s a time you obviously knew your family’s history and the leanings and the influence that they had had had. You had kind of a secret interest in dipping back into that or when you went to school in high studies?I didn’t I you know, it was a very patriarchal world, not a pleasant place to hang out. So it wasn’t much more about the work.And so I grew up in that and I just wanted to getaway. And when I went to study in Paris, I was super happy to not be thought of that. Although as we were traveling, my wife and I had a falling fifteen years. So we kept on making our old wine. Where I go or various grapes or you go under your truth. And so I never really left that. And coming in the Finger Lakes, I got in touch with other wine real owners then. And clearly Vienna was interested to get back into it. I understood the value of it, which I had not understood when I was much younger.You’re having your background and things. Did you bring something a little different to winemaking? Table?Yes. Here we decided. My wife and I decided to make wines that were different from what is made in the region because there are a lot of other wineries that make all the classic reasoning for that. So we make only French by wine, which means that blended. And we make a lot of that, a wholesale style which is so renewable. We make a bottle final, which is classic. We are talking about different origins, slightly different than the North American notion of a table wine.In France, a table wine is not necessarily a cheap wine.Supplying that you can rely on every day and one day is generally very versatile compared to the number of food. I’ll drink it by itself. I don’t fall very high in alcohol, only 12% some currently. We would go higher than that. And when I grow up, I’ll table wines were between nine and eleven for some alcohol. So that’s what we decided to focus on, but also fill these out for our base wines. But also we make too high on the wine, which are fortified wines, all that method wines. And these are a lot truculently. The oldest one is then that is 14 years old and the youngest blend is four years old.So I don’t know. I’m from you go with a full airline system, but it’s a blend from the intake shooting days.That concludes part two of our interview with Frédéric Bouché of Ports of New York.In our final episode, we’ll find out what he likes most about the winemaking industry.Thank you for listening. I’m Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best Five Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time, pour the wine, and ponder your next adventure.Please subscribe from your favorite Podcast Platform: <a...

In this episode, we talk with Frederic Bouche of Ports of New York Winery. We discuss his history of winemaking and French background.Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.Our featured winery is, we travel to Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University, and also has the highest percentage of workers who walk to work. Seventeen percent of their workers walk to work. Also home to Alex Haley, the Roots author, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Lolita author, and most importantly, home to Frédéric Bouché, and I'm the owner and a winemaker of lots of New York winery.As you can probably guess, Frederic is from France. So just a little background on France. They produce 78 billion gallons of wine per year. And going back even further, the Catholic Church at one time was the largest vineyard owner in France. However, in 1860, France was plagued with wine maladies. They hadn't quite perfected the making. And so, they declared it a national crisis in 1860. So they called in Louis Pasteur. Yes, the same man who perfected pasteurization. And in 1866, his essay, Studies on Wine, became the foundation of modern winemaking. He had saved France's wine industry. So that brings us up to Mr. Frédéric Bouché and his family history.So it started with my great grandfather in 1919. And that was in France, in Normandy. So basically, my great grandfather told me he had vineyards in Baldo, which is yet another region, a true wine region. But he moved to Normandy in 1919 because his wife was from there. And when he moved there, he realized there was no wine, no more. Which was not a wine region? So he saw the opportunity and brought in some of the table wine, just to put it in kind of context.How big is wine intertwined in their culture at that time?So in Normandy, nobody drank wine or very few people because there was no access to it. So they were drinking hard cider. And you are still very complex. Hot cider, cold calvados. And so he brought in the words and ignoring warnings from everywhere from France and then bottled them under his name, alanine, and then that's what he would sell. So he was one of the very first people to sell French wine cellar to hotels and restaurants in the region.They were loving this. They were there was a huge step up from cider to what he was producing. It was really high-end because you could. I mean, at that time, you could get the amazing wines for not much money and restaurants real. So we're doing custom labels for sure. Restaurants. Wow. It's quite amazing. Yeah. You think about 1999, the technology, and just what they were dealing with at the...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. Our featured winery in this episode. Our featured winery is Aloha, Volcano Winery.As we continue our interview with Kendall of Volcano Winery in Volcano, Hawaii, in our first episode, we learned that Volcano Winery is about 4000 feet high and is surrounded by volcanoes. And with that, it brings some special qualities to their appeal to what we call our Pinot Noir here on site. It’s considered one of our smaller batch wines. So it’s a little bit more exclusive compared to our house wines. And we take a lot of pride in our pinot noir. It’s very different from any other Pinot that I’ve personally tasted. It’s very light-bodied and super sulfuric and it’s got a lot of volcanic generality and cherry tart tones and subtle tannins. And it’s just very easy drinking. And it’s a hit with the community and from people all over the world because, you know, Pinot Noir is known for being a very temperamental grape. And there’s a lot of different regions in the world that are known for Pinot Noir. So it’s kind of fun to come over here and taste it. Hawaiian Grill and Pinot Noir Grape.I read online were a Canadian couple came to the winery and I guess they bought more wine and it was allowed for them to get back into Canada with. So they had to make arrangements probably give it away or something. It was so good.Man, that’s a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. We are a small production here. So when it comes to shipping back to other places, there are a lot of our customers. We do ship to the majority of the United States to ship to about 39 states in that shipping via alcohol license things and kind of matching them up with the other states. Unfortunately, we don’t ship to everybody and we don’t distribute. We only distribute within the Hawaiian Islands because you’re at 4000 feet. Is that an advantage or disadvantage if you’re here during our follow winter season and you’ll notice that the vines look a little sad. I don’t want to say that, but they’re actually dormant. So there’s no greenery. There are no grapes on the plant physically at this time during the fall and winter season. And that’s just because they’re kind of gearing up, getting ready for that spring and summer season when they will be flourishing and they’ll be green and they’ll be pumping out the great the grape plants. So it takes about eight years for the grape plant to produce fruit. Once it’s planted, once it’s producing fruit in order to produce a healthy grape. It has to go into a state of dormancy. And that’s pretty much for half a year in that dormancy is achieved by the plant being in a location that reaches temperatures below 40 degrees. And that temperature has to remain below 40 degrees consistent enough. So a majority of the day for come and maintain that dormancy.That’s the trigger. Yet that’s the trigger that luckily that’s our biggest advantage of being at this elevation, allowing us to have those mountain winds in those cooler temperatures through the winter season, which in turn would have that natural dormancy for our grape. So that’s a big plus for us here.Wow. Some good stuff with Volcano Winery in Volcano, Hawaii. Thank you, Kendall. If anybody wants to get a hold of you, obviously, how can they do that?Not only can you give us a call anytime during our business hours roll. Happy to help you with any kind of questions or shipping or orders on the phone. We have (808) 967-7772. On our web site, you’ll have a list of all of our wines, all the states that we ship to. You’ll have...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. Let’s start the adventure. Our featured winery in this episode.We find out America’s Southern Most Winery. Do you have a guess? Let me give you a hint. Aloha. Oh, you guessed it’s Volcano Hawaii is where we venture to.My name’s Kendall. And I’m the assistant manager and my associate here at Volcano Winery. Well, hello, Kendall. When you first come into the parking lot, and you look at the winery, what are we looking at?Yeah. So when you first take a glance at Volcano Winery, the first thing that’ll definitely jump out to you is that we grow grapes here. We have rows of grapevines, Japanese tea plants, olive trees, and a one of a kind Hawaiian grown cork tree.Now, what is also a cork tree?So it’s a cork tree, but it’s harvested. You harvest cork from it. So the outer layer of the tree is how you harvest the cork. And it regenerates every seven years.And that’s what you used to cork up the wine, as you know, cork says, what we up in that bottle. They keep it nice and sealed up. We also have a small tasting room. And in addition to that, we offer a free vineyard and production room tours in the backdrop. You’ll see Mauna Loa volcano on the left and Monacan volcano on the right. And then we’re heavily forested up in this area.We have tons of native forests and lava tubes on the property here. Lava tube? What is that?The volcano system on this island. They are not the explosive volcano that you would expect to see. They’re called shield volcanoes. And so, a shield volcano, instead of exploding out, it houses the lava in a big crater. And then when it goes to release the lava, it shoots it out, kind of like a plumbing system. It shoots it through all the lava tubes which are under our feet.So you’re just outside of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I imagine you get a lot of traffic coming from the park.Yeah. So we’re about two miles from the national park entrance. So a lot of the time, we have customers that are hiking during the day, and then they come to check us out for an afternoon tasting or kind of the opposite. People come in first thing in the morning and do a little tasting so that they can go hiking with a little by little wine.Right. It’s sort of that mountain. That volcano doesn’t look so big when they’re taking it.Yeah. In reality, those are the two biggest mountains in the world. If we measure them from under the ocean to the tippy, tippy top of those mountains, taller than Mt. Everest. Yeah. Wow. So I was reading on the Web site where you’re very passionate about sustainability. So I imagine over the years, you’ve had to do some experimenting to make that happen.We’ve experimented with a lot of different great varietals here, and we’ve narrowed it down to four varietals that work well for our microclimate here in the volcano. And those would include a great cold symphony, and symphony is a hybrid. UC Davis, California, actually created this grape in the 40s by doing a cross of the Mascotte grapes and the Grenache grape. So it’s kind of a cedar white grape. And we tried to blend it through a lot of our wine since it’s the main grapes that we’re producing here. We also do a grape called Cayuse Awaits. And that was created at <a...

This episode brings you insights from Ken Callaghan of Callaghan Vineyards, as we explore the intriguing world of wine production in Elgin, Arizona. Callaghan shares his experiences and expertise accumulated over nearly 30 years, emphasizing the importance of understanding wine aging through a unique library tasting event. Listeners will discover the distinctions between wine grapes and table grapes, highlighting the complexity and variety inherent in winemaking. Ken's achievements, including accolades from prestigious competitions, showcase the quality and craftsmanship at Callaghan Vineyards. Join us for a delightful journey into the art of winemaking, where every vintage tells a story and every sip is an adventure.Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. Let’s start the adventure.Our featured winery is we return to Elgin, Arizona, for part two of our interview with Kent Callaghan Vineyards. Some of the events that they put on at the winery is a library tasting where they share a library worth of wines and they take you to a behind the scenes special event. You get to sample wines from their earliest vintages back when they started in early 1990 to the wines that they are producing now. So you get to compare the two.I think it’s interesting for them to see, you know, the library historical data to see how the wines age, what’s done well, you know, and how these images are different, because we definitely have vintage variation in Arizona in general, and particularly in Sonoita, the monsoon rainfall that we would get.So when you’ve been working with the vines for close to 30 years, as Kent has, you tend to get recognized in the wine industry with some awards, most recently a governor’s dinner in 2017 San Francisco Chronicle, probably a competition that people in California can relate to. And we got Pinot 19 in competition got Best of Class. Got the craft in the last competition and 2020 launches happen in January. Man, I have been there a white one best of class. So they tend to do pretty well in the competition. If you’d like to inquire more about what’s going on with the events or even visit the winery in Elgin, Arizona, at Callaghan Vineyards, how can people get a hold of you can go to the website Callaghanvineyards.comAll right. Thank you very much for your time. It has been very enlightening. Yeah. Thanks for us. Thank you.It is time now for our listener voicemail question.My name is Jolene Erickson and I’m from Flagstaff, Arizona. And I was wondering when making wine do you have to have seedless grapes? If you could answer that question. That would be awesome. Thank you.No, you do not have to use seedless grapes. However, there is a difference between wine grapes and table grapes. There are over a thousand different varieties of grapes made for winemaking. They’ve converged them over the years. Plus, wine grapes have a very thick skin, unlike the table grape, which has a very thin skin. So it’s easy to eat and the differences go on and on. That’s what makes winemaking so intriguing. The layers are endless.Thank you for listening. I’m Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM.If you like the...

Discover the fascinating journey of Callaghan Vineyards, a winery in Arizona that emphasizes the importance of quality over quantity in winemaking. Host Forrest Kelly interviews Kent Callaghan, who shares insights into the challenges faced when starting the vineyard amidst extreme weather conditions in the 1990s. With over 30 years of experience, Kent discusses the critical role of pruning in achieving success and the ongoing quest to determine which grape varieties thrive best in Arizona’s unique climate. Listeners will also learn about the intriguing history of the corkscrew, a tool essential for wine lovers. Join us for an adventure through the world of winemaking, where Kent’s passion and dedication shine through, making it clear that the journey of discovery is just as important as the final product in the glass.Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.Our featured winery is: We venture to Arizona. Callaghan Vineyards. Dr. Gordon Dutt, doing some research for a project that he was working on, was surprised to find that there were no wineries in the state, even though the soil composition was similar to Burgundy France after some funding. The wine business was born in Elgin, Arizona. The state of Arizona has over 100 wineries, but in a particular area, we’re talking about is fifteen, including Kent, Callaghan Vineyards.So we go back to summertime 1990, Ken’s parents decide to start the vineyards along with Kent. But Mother Nature didn’t exactly greet him with open arms.Well, we planted in the middle of a heatwave. It was the first time, as far as I know, Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix had shut down. Think it was 122 for a couple of days. It was 105 here in Elgin.So we lost a lot of our plantings right off the bat in Cabernet, which was about 9000 of those vines to us, probably twenty-five hundred.It’s going to be all that hard work. Then to see those vines die because of the extreme heat, you probably wonder whose idea was this anyway?It was my dad’s idea. He had been a real home winemaker, so they thought this parcel man asked me to come on to help them plant the starting point of entry and start a winery. I was right out of college at that point, basically.So you graduate from college. Where did you to college? Pomona in Claremont. Okay. In Southern California. And graduated with a degree in philosophy. So from that to the current time, you’ve been doing this. What? Let’s say you do the math. You’re a little over 30 years.Yeah, 30 years. 30 of vintage this year and then 31st first year growing.How big is pruning into the success of a vineyard? It’s huge. In my opinion, the single most important thing that you do if I had to rank them.Why is it so critical? Well, It sets the stage for basically everything else. If you prune correctly, you know, you’re just setting yourself up for success the vine architecture, the way the vine grows is going to give you hope what you know, he’s intending to get with less need for inputs, particularly manual input.Without getting too...

Join us as we explore the fascinating world of fruit wines at Bear Creek Winery in Homer, Alaska, where the flavor profiles are refreshingly distinct from traditional grape wines. Host Forest Kelly engages with winery owner Lewis, who shares insights into the challenges and triumphs of crafting wines from local berries and fruits in a region known for its halibut fishing. Discover the innovative spirit behind their popular strawberry rhubarb wine and the exciting plans for new products, including sparkling apple wine. Lewis highlights the collaborative nature of the winemaking community in Alaska, emphasizing the unique tastes that fruit wines bring to the table. This episode promises to expand your palate and inspire your next culinary pairing adventure.Bear Creek WineryWelcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. Our featured winery is Bear Creek Winery as we venture to Homer, Alaska. Population just over 5,000, the halibut fishing capital of the world. Home to such famous people as the singer Jewel. Mr. Motel 6 Tom Bodett. Tom Bodett: We’ll sure leave the light on for you. Forrest Kelly: Thanks Tom and Bear Creek Winery, owner-operator Louis Mauer.  That is correct. So when we pull into the parking lot at Bear Creek Winery, what do we see? Beautiful set of grounds and gardens that you can see and so there’s a little aft people can walk through and we’ve highlighted some of the berries, the fruits, and berries that we use in our wines in the garden. No, the first thing people think of, you know, a winery in Alaska. How is that possible? Are there any hardships?Well, yes. If we were trying to grow our grape, it would be extremely difficult. Which we’ve actually tried cultivating grapes and they’ll root and they do okay during the summer months, but then they’re very difficult over winter with the cold. Our most challenging thing is probably shipping items, getting stuff up here, and getting things back down the lower 48. It is always a challenge and costly.In the early years, you were doing five-gallon batches and now you’re over what, 20,000 gallons a year?  That’s correct. Right now, we ship anywhere in the US.So your featured wine, your home run, your grand slam home run wine would be?Our strawberry rhubarb. We have two brands, one’s a Bear Creek and the strawberry rhubarb is by far our most popular wine. We make a strawberry wine and then a rhubarb wine and blend the two together. And then for our Glacier Bear, which is our sister label that we’ve produced in order to highlight the guaranteed to be grown in Alaska fruit wines. We have a golden raspberry that we make that’s extremely popular.Do you get any push back from traditional wineries?No, not from wineries but within wine tasters. Everything’s interested in what we’re doing,  it’s very collaborative. We get more blowback from customers coming into the tasting room and not understanding what it is that we do more so than people in the industry.It’s the taste of a fruit wine that much...