Best Technical Podcasts About Wine - 2020
As a winemaker and wine lover, I'm constantly looking for insights and inspiration about growing wine, making wine, trends in wine, and wine business strategies. I also want to get to know the people behind the wine, to learn about new brands, and continue to discover and learn about every aspect of the world of wine.
So the podcasts listed here represent what I have found to be the best options to find all of these things. These tend to be highly technical, and dig into the specifics of viticultural approaches, winemaking techniques, wine business operations, and the nuances of wine region, wine style, and wine personalities.
In short, these wine podcasts are not for beginners or casual wine drinkers. These are the best wine podcasts for wine professionals and wine lovers with advanced wine knowledge or a desire to acquire advanced wine knowledge. These are longform wine podcasts that will fascinate wine professionals and deliver an immense amount of information about all aspects of wine.
I've listed these in two tiers: Consistently Satisfying Wine Podcasts and Often Very Good Wine Podcasts.
Basically every episode of the Consistently Satisfying Wine Podcasts gives me some or all of what I want, and I learn something new from each episode. Sometimes an episode in this category can be so densely packed with info that it bears re-listening.
Many episodes of the Often Very Good Wine Podcasts deliver the goods. When they don't, it's not because they are bad or uninteresting, they just may cover other subjects besides wine (in the case of Consumed or GuildSomm), or delve so deeply (in the case of I'll Drink To That) into wine people that they become almost academic in their personal and regional histories, and lack immediate relevance to someone who is trying to start and run a wine business today in California.
Every podcast on both lists is praiseworthy and deserves a good listen.
Here are the Best Technical Podcasts About Wine in the year 2020:
Consistently Satisfying Wine Podcasts
Chappy Cottrell, the host of Cru Podcast, is also the Wine Director at Barndiva in Sonoma. Chappy does a great job of making Cru podcast high quality and full of well-chosen and highly regarded guests. He delves into many aspects of the wine business, and often elicits great insights into current trends in wine.
I'd love to hear more digging into the technical aspects of winemaking, but Chappy isn't a winemaker, yet, so I'm not really expecting him to go there. Chappy wants his own wine business someday, so we benefit from his desire to learn and make valuable connections.
Cru is a weekly podcast, which is something I love. So many podcasts are sporadic, and I find myself jonesing for another long before one gets released. With Cru, I know there will be a new podcast every Monday.
Some fun notes about Cru Podcast:
- Almost every episode Chappy gives a lengthy introduction that he ends with "without further ado..."
- He asks each guest, "Why wine?" I find it to be a perfect, simple question that immediately gets the guests thinking at a deeper level and sets a thoughtful and more personal tone for the interview.
- At some point well into the interview, Chappy almost always says, "I want to be conscious our your time..." and then he often goes on to ask quite a few additional questions that can take a significant amount of time.
- If your hands aren't free to stop the podcast at the end, you'll discover that Chappy sometimes lets his theme music play for several minutes. It's happy, house-y, dance-y music, and you can transition from listening to a great wine podcast to bouncing a solo dance party in your car (or wherever).
The host of the Inside Winemaking podcast is Jim Duane. Jim is the winemaker for Seavey Vineyard and has some serious Napa Cab cred. Jim is a graduate of the UC Davis wine program (but he probably would not recommend the same path to others... and don't get him started on hipsters). His promotion of self-learned expertise is part of his charm, and clearly a big part of why he started the Inside Winemaking podcast.
Inside Winemaking episodes are released sporadically. Jim is a busy guy, and winemaking doesn't often allow for regular hours. But nearly every episode digs into juicy technical details about some aspects of winemaking or the wine business, so they are worth the wait.
The production quality is variable. Jim is a winemaker, not an audio engineer, and he often records episodes on location in active wineries, echo-y cellars, at noisy conferences, or in breezy vineyards. But the quality of the guests and the content is never lacking.
This is not a casual wine-drinker's podcast. You will at times experience some chemistry and math, and the words viticulture and oenology. You will learn various technical ways to make lots of different kinds of wines. You will hear the acronyms TA, VA, PV, pH, RS, H2S and SO2. You may need to re-listen to some episodes and take notes.
This is my kind of podcast. This is my grad school.
Some fun tidbits about Inside Winemaking Podcast:
- At the tail end of each episode Jim asks his guests, "What did your childhood smell like?" It may be one of the most random and interesting questions I've ever heard in any podcast.
- The Inside Winemaking theme music reminds me of Buzz Lightyear's Spanish setting.
- Jim does an episode from an improvised burgundy barrel hot tub in which he (drunkenly?) discusses all the technical ways that flavor is created in wine. Now that's how to do science!
Often Very Good Wine Podcasts
The GuildSomm Podcast is high quality in every way. The only reason it doesn't consistently satisfy me is that it is by sommeliers and mainly for sommeliers or others in beverage hospitality. I am not a somm, and have even argued (on behalf of somms) that blind tasting is a huge waste of time and energy. So when the GuildSomm podcast delves into blind tasting, it's a big miss for me.
If you're a somm, though, or interested in the things that interest somms, every episode of the GuildSomm podcast should delight you.
Hosted by Levi Dalton, I'll Drink To That (IDTT) is another very high quality podcast. It features interviews with luminaries of the wine world from around the globe. IDTT is an oral history and audio archive of the wine industry from the mouths of those who had, and continue to have, fundamental influence on the rest of us.
This is why it can be hit or miss for me. Sometimes the personal and historical details of the guests are so deeply explored as to feel academic. It's great history for those who love wine history, but occasionally lacks practical application to how I make and sell wine today.
A new podcast in 2020, Two Glasses In was created by Santa Barbara to highlight some of the big names and celebutantes of the Santa Barbara wine scene. The host, Bion Rice, was CEO and director of winemaking at Sunstone Vineyards & Winery. He knows wine, and he has worked with, or near, many of his guests for many years. It's new, and there aren't yet a lot of episodes, but the quality is high.
Viticole podcast is the brainchild of Master Sommelier and Somm documentary series star Brian McClintic. Brian is passionate, with strong opinions, and I happen to agree with many of his ideas about the direction wine should be heading in terms of organic, regenerative viticulture. Fascinating, at times highly scientific, discussions with smart guests turn this idea-rich wine podcast into something much larger in scope.
The only downside is that Brian hasn't put out very many episodes, and he definitely doesn't put them out regularly.
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