In 1980, a Swiss couple on a Christmas visit to Tuscany noticed one hillside in Chianti sitting in full sun while the whole valley around it disappeared into fog. They bought that hill the following year. They liked the light, nothing more.

In this episode of Read Between the Wines, Pierre Ferland sits down with Barbara Widmer, Winemaker and CEO of Brancaia, in Castellina in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy, to ask what it means to inherit a vision and decide what to protect and what to tear up.

Barbara was studying architecture in Zurich when the 1994 harvest pulled her back to her parents' estate. She went on to study oenology, and her thesis on a newly acquired coastal property in Maremma started a one label strategy now stretched across three estates with distinct characters: Castellina, Radda in Chianti and Maremma. Where other Tuscan families split their holdings into separate brands, Brancaia chose the opposite path.

We talk about Il Blu, the wine so far outside Chianti Classico's own rules it had to be sold as a table wine and became one of the first Super Tuscans. We talk about how a wine earns its name at Brancaia, the shift to controlled fermentation as harvests grow warmer, and replanting with massal selection instead of nursery clones. And we end on a harder question: does wine, does Tuscany, still have something worth protecting.

A short bonus episode on sustainability and climate change at Brancaia is available exclusively on our website.

Featuring: Brancaia, Barbara Widmer, Il Blu, Chianti Classico, Castellina in Chianti, Radda in Chianti, Maremma Toscana, Super Tuscan, organic farming, sustainability, Tuscany, Italy.

What does it take to fix a problem an entire industry had quietly decided was unfixable?

Greg Lambrecht, inventor, founder, and chairman of Coravin, joins Pierre Ferland for a conversation that starts in a wine shop at sixteen and ends up rewriting how the world drinks by the glass. An MIT-trained engineer who spent his career designing chemotherapy needles and spinal implants, Lambrecht looked at the oldest rule in wine — open it, and the clock starts — and treated it like a design flaw instead of a tradition.

We go deep into the early prototypes tested on friends, including a neurosurgeon who tried to pay him in wine, the decision to step back as CEO once he realized he was a medical device guy, not a consumer products guy, and the eight years it took to crack Coravin Sparkling after a Guardian critic's one blunt question wrecked his London launch. We talk about walking into hostile Bordeaux chateaux where producers threatened to break his needle, the retailer who changed everything in one Paris sidewalk demo, and Veronique Sanders, the Bordeaux producer who opened the door Coravin needed. We also get into the QVC lesson that reshaped how Coravin sells, his dream of great wine sold by the glass at retail, and the newly launched Coravin Guide, now live in Madrid, New York, and Miami.

Greg put it best: "Our biggest competitor is that sentence, I finished the bottle."

This one comes with a bonus. We asked Greg the question we couldn't let go of: ten years from now, is this still a Coravin device — or has it become a platform, a media brand, a whole new category? His answer, plus his real philosophy on leadership, ego, and why the Coravin Guide spends its spotlight on everyone but Coravin, is in an exclusive bonus episode, available only at readbetweenthewines.com. It doesn't stream anywhere else — this one's for the website only.

Featuring: Coravin, Greg Lambrecht, wine preservation technology, wine by the glass, Coravin Guide, Timeless, Pivot, Sparkling, Bordeaux, Veronique Sanders, QVC, wine industry innovation, medical device invention, wine storytelling.

Why does a 155-year-old empire keep reinventing itself — when coasting was always an option?

Mireia Torres Maczassek, Director of Knowledge and Innovation at Familia Torres, joins Pierre Ferland for a conversation recorded live in Montreal at a Primum Familiae Vini gathering — and it is exactly as good as that setting sounds. Fifth generation of one of the most recognised wine dynasties on the planet, chemical engineer turned oenologist, director of both Torres Priorat and Bodegas Jean Leon, and the scientist quietly running one of the most ambitious research programmes in the history of wine.

We go deep into the 40-year project to recover pre-phylloxera Catalan grape varieties — found in forests, climbing trees, surviving near creek beds — and what it means to give a lost vine a name. We talk about the Torres & Earth climate programme, regenerative viticulture at scale across more than 1,100 organic hectares, and the very honest question of whether doing enough and feeling like you are doing enough are actually the same thing. We discuss Mas La Plana, Grans Muralles, the Waltraud Riesling — a love letter planted at 500 metres in the Penèdes mountains — and the brandy that almost nobody talks about despite nearly a century of production. And we travel to Chile, where the family has been making wine since 1979 and where the ancestral varieties project takes on an entirely different cultural weight.

Mireia put it best: we are going backwards in the sense that we are recovering what was lost. But we are going forward, because we have to find what survives.

Featuring: Familia Torres, Mireia Torres Maczassek, Spanish wine, Penèdes, Priorat, Catalonia, ancestral grape varieties, regenerative viticulture, Mas La Plana, Grans Muralles, Waltraud Riesling, Jaime I brandy, Torres Chile, Primum Familiae Vini, fine wine, terroir.