Rudi Pichler has a rule: act, don't react. It's shown up in every decision he's made since he came home from working a harvest in Napa Valley and took over his family's small, struggling vineyard in 1997 — including the year he deliberately cut two-thirds of his own harvest, the year his twins were born, just to make sure there'd be a handful of bottles waiting for them thirty years later.

Matt talks with Rudi and his daughter Theresa, who now runs export and marketing for the estate. The Pichler family has farmed since 1731. They talk about the grandmother who told Rudi which impossible, abandoned vineyard to buy (it's now one of the most celebrated sites in the region), the moment a legendary Burgundy critic told him he didn't need a single oak barrel, and the two soils in one small vineyard that are 370 million years and 16,000 years old respectively. It's a conversation about staying small on purpose in an industry that mostly rewards getting bigger.

In this conversation:

• Why Rudi calls himself a "wine caretaker" instead of a winemaker
• The Wachau's three-tier quality system — Steinfeder, Federspiel, Smaragd — explained simply
• The vineyard nobody else wanted, and the grandmother who told him to buy it anyway
• What it means to lose the fear of being too small, learned in the shadow of Napa Valley
• Foot-stomped maceration, leaf canopies as sun umbrellas, and why Rudi still refuses new oak
• The 1996 harvest Rudi cut on purpose, and the wine his twins are only now old enough to drink

Presented by InVintory. Download InVintory and enjoy wine the way it's meant to be. Code WINECENTRIC gets you 25% off a year of Premium.

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:

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THE PREFERRED GLASS OF THE WINE CENTRIC SHOW
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Madeline Puckette didn't set out to build Wine Folly. She lost her graphic design job in the 2008 recession, followed a boyfriend to Reno, and picked up a stack of wine encyclopedias from a bar owner who needed help on slow nights. None of it was the plan. Nearly two decades later, she's the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of one of the most recognizable names in wine education, co-author of a New York Times bestseller and a James Beard Award winner, and the person whose visual framework AI chatbots now use to answer wine questions without crediting her.

That unplanned path runs through a wide-ranging conversation: the bottle that broke her mental model of what wine could even taste like (it smelled like black olives), the flavor cards she doodled behind a wine bar that became the seed of Wine Folly, and why she thinks the wine world's go-to explanation for sandy soil is often wrong.

Madeline is the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of Wine Folly under Folly Enterprises, co-author of two books (a New York Times bestseller and a James Beard Award winner), and has appeared in Jason Wise's Somm: Into the Bottle and Somm 3.

In this conversation:

• The vocalist-to-wine comparison game, including her pick for a Whitney Houston wine
• How the 2008 recession led her from a graphic design job to a wine bar in Reno
• The Chateau de Montfaucon 2005 Côtes du Rhône that broke her idea of what wine could taste like
• The flavor cards that became the first version of Wine Folly
• Why AI is now answering wine questions with her own decade of work, uncredited
• Her current obsessions: Slovenia's Goriška Brda region and Hungarian Hárslevelű
• Biking through Alto Adige with sommelier Aldo Sohm
• Hiring a Master of Wine to challenge her own teaching model
• Why sandy soil doesn't fully explain a lighter-bodied Gamay

Presented by InVintory. Manage your wine collection with 3D cellar visualization. Use code WINECENTRIC for 25% off InVintory Premium.

Wine Folly: www.winefolly.com

Madeline's Instagram: @madelinepuck

Wine Folly's Instagram: @winefolly

Elisabetta Gnudi Angelini wanted Caparzo. Eleven partners owned it, and getting them all to say yes took four and a half years. She didn't walk away. That patience became the foundation of one of Tuscany's most quietly powerful wine families.

Matt Weiss talks with Elisabetta and her daughter Alessandra about how they built a portfolio that runs from Brunello di Montalcino to Chianti Classico to the Maremma: Caparzo, Altesino, Borgo Scopeto, Doga delle Clavule, and a fifth Montalcino estate still taking shape.

They get into the green label that broke every rule of 1970s wine design, why Montalcino stakes everything on big Slavonian oak, and what it took for a woman to run the deal in a corner of Tuscany that wasn't ready for one. It's a family story, a business story, and a Brunello story all at once.

New episodes of The Wine Centric Show every week.

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/

THE PREFERRED GLASS OF THE WINE CENTRIC SHOW
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Wine tech has a problem nobody talked about until Josh Daiter's father pulled a shelf out of his wine fridge in Florida, watched the bottle he was hunting for roll off and shatter on the floor, and called his son the next morning fed up. That broken bottle became InVintory, now one of the leading platforms in wine collecting.

This is the first episode of The Wine Centric Show to go deep on cellar management and wine technology, and our guest is Josh Daiter, co founder and CEO of InVintory. Josh holds two master's degrees, in entrepreneurship and in AI, and he wasn't even into wine when he started. Over the hour we trace the company from an augmented reality experiment to its 3D VinLocate cellar mapping, its sommelier vetted database of more than 650,000 wines, and Vincent, the AI sommelier that is equal parts beloved and controversial.
We also get into the things most founders won't say out loud: why wine pricing apps are "always suspect" and how InVintory keeps a collection's value honest, the "dumbest, smartest" $100K ad summer that landed 20,000 users, how a team of just 11 competes with the giants, why the wine world resists AI harder than almost any other industry, and where cellar management goes when the app disappears into your glasses and your kitchen speaker.

Whether you track your collection in InVintory, CellarTracker, Vivino, or a battered Excel sheet, this one is about the future of how we collect, store, and actually enjoy wine.
🍷 Download InVintory and drink deliciously.

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/

THE PREFERRED GLASS OF THE WINE CENTRIC SHOW
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#WineCentricShow, #MattWeiss, #InVintory, #JoshDaiter, #WineTech, #CellarManagement, #WineCollecting, #WineCellar, #WineApp, #AISommelier, #VinLocate, #CellarTracker, #Vivino, #LiveX, #WinePricing, #WineData, #WineStartup, #WineTechnology, #WineCollection, #FineWine, #WineInvestment, #WineStorage, #Sommelier, #WineTrade, #WineIndustry, #WinePodcast, #Wine

Paul Michael didn't plant his first vines by choice. He was seventeen years old, on a family holiday in California, when his father climbed out of a rented Cadillac in the middle of Knights Valley and announced they were coming back to plant. That was 1982. What followed is one of the great origin stories in American wine.

Paul and his wife Emily join Matt Weiss to talk about the multigenerational vision behind Peter Michael Winery, the accidental tasting that started it all, how a five-year-old waking up above the fog line named one of their most celebrated wines, and what it means to build something designed to outlast you.

They also reveal the four bottles Paul would open for someone who had never heard of Peter Michael — vintage specific. Write them down.

Recorded at Fearrington House, Pittsboro, North Carolina.

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/

THE PREFERRED GLASS OF THE WINE CENTRIC SHOW
▪️Glasvin: Use code WINECENTRIC for 10% off: https://tidd.ly/41vgdSQ

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Pepe Raventós is a 21st generation winemaker who walked away from the appellation his grandfather helped build. Cava had become a commodity. The name carried the wrong story. So he left.

What followed was a decade-long fight to prove that Penedès — a poor, rural corner of Catalonia with more than 3,000 years of winemaking history — deserves its own appellation and a seat at the table with the greatest sparkling wines in the world.

Along the way, Pepe planted the wrong grape in the wrong place, discovered an abandoned farm nearly converted to a chicken factory, and built a winery in a garage underneath his bed. He paid farmers twice the going rate. Moved his family to New York for five years. And found an almost extinct grape called Sumoll that he believes will one day rival Nebbiolo on the world stage.

This is not a conversation about Cava. It's about what happens when a rebel with deep roots decides to start from scratch.

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/

THE PREFERRED GLASS OF THE WINE CENTRIC SHOW
▪️Glasvin: Use code WINECENTRIC for 10% off: https://tidd.ly/41vgdSQ

🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into wine culture.
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🔗 Full episode and show notes at winecentricshow.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Pepe Raventos and His Journey
04:54 Leaving the DO: A Family Decision
10:33 The Philosophy of Natural Winemaking
15:47 Exploring the Unique Characteristics of Charello
21:19 Cultural Influences: From Penedes to New York
27:11 The Economic Impact of Kava on Farmers
33:50 Reviving Abandoned Vineyards and Local Communities
41:03 Balancing Passion and Business in Winemaking
50:01 The Future of Penedès Wines and Recommendations
54:29 Wine_Centric_Show_v1 Linked Comp 05.mp4

Tags:#PepeRaventós, #RaventósIBlanc, #SpanishWine, #WineCentricShow, #Penedès, #CanSumoi, #Xarello, #Sumoll, #WinePodcast, #Sommelier, #WineInterview, #Winemaker, #NaturalWine, #SparklingWine, #CavaAlternative

Bobby Stuckey has spent twenty years telling Americans that the most important wine region in Italy isn't Tuscany. It isn't Piedmont either.

It's Friuli.

As co-founder of Frasca Food and Wine and one of the most respected Master Sommeliers in the country, Stuckey has watched food journalists question whether fine dining still has a place in American culture. He has a clear answer: they don't know what they're talking about.

This conversation covers the wines and producers that put Friuli on the map, the real story behind orange wine, why Merlot and Chardonnay belong in Friuli just as much as Ribolla Gialla, and what it actually takes to build a restaurant culture around a region most Americans have never heard of.

One question runs through all of it: how long does a grape need to grow somewhere before it becomes part of that place?

We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/
▪️Glasvin: Use code WINECENTRIC for 10% off: https://tidd.ly/41vgdSQ

🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into wine culture.
🎧 Listen now on YouTube + all podcast platforms
🔗 Full episode and show notes at winecentricshow.com

When the most powerful man in the world imposed tariffs that threatened to put his business under, Victor Owen Schwartz did what almost no one else was willing to do. He sued. And he won.

As lead plaintiff in VOS Selections v. Donald Trump, this 40-year wine importer took the fight from the Court of International Trade all the way to the Supreme Court — winning at every stop. 3-0. 7-2. 6-3.

On the morning this episode was recorded, his tariff refunds hit his bank account for the first time.

We get into what IEEPA tariffs actually did to an importer running on 5% margins, why Amazon blinked while Victor didn't, how a brunch he almost skipped changed everything, and what it feels like when justice stops being theoretical and shows up in your bank account.

📩 Subscribe to the biweekly Wine Centric Newsletter at winecentricshow.com
We’re grateful for the support of our episode partners:
▪️Fearrington House: https://fearrington.com/
▪️Glasvin: Use code WINECENTRIC for 10% off: https://tidd.ly/41vgdSQ
🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into wine culture.
🎧 Listen now on YouTube + all podcast platforms
🔗 Full episode and show notes at winecentricshow.com