In 1981, someone had the nerve to plant Cabernet and Merlot on the Tuscan coast in a place no one thought could grow great wine. Forty years later, Ornellaia is one of the most celebrated estates on the planet. Lamberto Frescobaldi joins Jeff Zacharia to tell the whole story and to explain why the best may still be ahead.

About Lamberto Frescobaldi

Lamberto Frescobaldi is the head of the Frescobaldi family wine estates, one of Italy's most historic wine dynasties with roots in Tuscany dating to the 14th century. Under his leadership, Frescobaldi acquired and built Ornellaia into a global benchmark, alongside celebrated estates including Masseto, CastelGiocondo, and Nipozzano.

In this conversation

— How Bolgheri went from an afterthought to one of Italy's great wine regions

— The 1998 Wine Spectator Top 100 moment Lamberto calls "a rocket" for Ornellaia

— What Ornellaia actually feels like; warm, polished, Mediterranean in spirit, never asking you to dress up for it

— Why Lamberto refuses the "Super Tuscan" label, and why he's grateful Americans invented it

— Walking a vineyard and seeing not a cluster of grapes but a bottle with a label already on it

— The new generation of wine drinkers, more open, more curious, less beholden to old hierarchies

— Why people will drink less wine in the years ahead, and why that is not a bad thing

— The line Lamberto says he would put on the back of every bottle: ‘forbidden to drink alone’

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

01:35 Growing up Frescobaldi — countryside, cellars, and no pressure

05:45 An early sip through a straw and the feeling of being grown up

08:30 It all starts in the vineyard — a connection to Graeme MacDonald

11:27 How Ornellaia began: Bolgheri, Cabernet, and a radical vision

14:25 The 1985 first vintage and the road to recognition

15:24 The 1998 Wine Spectator Top 100 — the moment everything changed

16:40 How to describe Ornellaia: warmth, balance, and a wink

19:45 Super Tuscan — a label Lamberto never uses but is grateful for

25:26 How the luxury wine consumer is changing

28:26 The future of wine — opportunity, tension, and staying hungry

31:05 Bolgheri's continued potential and the challenge for new producers

34:34 The long view — investment horizons and generational thinking

35:10 Stewardship: echoes of Lafleur and Laura Catena

36:41 Authenticity: seeing a bottle hanging in the vineyard

39:03 Place matters more than ever — every bottle is a trip

40:52 Wine is not something you drink alone

42:01 Early wine memory: a straw, a bottle, and a room full of oil-sealed wine

44:06 Breakout moment: the best has yet to come

45:34 Advice for anyone who feels they don't belong in wine

Related episodes

Ep. 001 — Omri Ram, Château Lafleur

Ep. 004 — Graeme & Alex MacDonald, MacDonald Vineyards

Ep. 006 — Dr. Laura Catena, Bodega Catena Zapata

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La Tête d'Or

For nearly 300 years, Château Gruaud-Larose has occupied one of the great terroirs of Saint-Julien: nearly 200 acres in an extraordinary single, unbroken vineyard.

And yet, for a good part of its modern history, I thought of Gruaud-Larose as something of a sleeper Second Growth, a château whose wines didn't always fully reflect the potential of its remarkable terroir.

I don't believe that anymore.

My guest, Nicolas Sinoquet, CEO of Château Gruaud-Larose, has spent more than a decade helping lead the estate's resurgence. His route there was unusual: raised in Normandy outside the wine business, he was preparing to build an Armagnac business when a conversation with Jean Merlaut, Gruaud-Larose's owner and his wife's uncle, unexpectedly changed his path. Nicolas says it took him about three seconds to accept an offer from Jean..

What followed was not a reinvention of Gruaud-Larose so much as a long-term effort to unlock what was already there.

We talk about why Nicolas believes the vineyard must always come first, the decades required to transform a great vineyard, the estate's move to organic farming, and why the 2025 vintage may represent the wine he has been trying to make since arriving.

But our conversation goes well beyond winemaking.

Nicolas has some refreshingly unconventional views about Bordeaux: why château prices must remain reasonable, why the en primeur system may need to evolve, why estates may increasingly need to age wines themselves, and why Bordeaux must become less intimidating if it wants to attract the next generation of wine drinkers.

And then there is stewardship.

A bottle of 1989 Gruaud-Larose taught Nicolas something fundamental: he may work at the château for 30 years, but the wines can live far longer than any one person's tenure. His responsibility isn't to leave his mark. It's to care for something that existed long before him and will continue long after him.

It's a conversation about patience, change, and how you move a nearly 300-year-old château forward without losing what made it special in the first place.

Marc Bouffard is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is also, by any measure, one of the most respected independent voices in fine wine — built not from a role in the trade, not from a formal credential, but from pure passion, a scientist's rigor, and an Instagram account called @englishmans_claret.

In this episode, Marc and Jeff sit down to talk about how all of it happened: the 1966 Léoville Barton that opened a door to the Barton-Sartorius family; the vertical of Ducru-Beaucaillou going back to 1929 that began a lasting friendship with Bruno Borie; and why a Harvard neurologist with friends "in real life" eventually said yes to Instagram — and wrote a 368-page book.

That book is Saint-Julien: Vineyards, Cellars, People, and Place (Académie du Vin Library), the first volume in a planned series covering all of Bordeaux's major appellations. It covers all eleven classified growths of Saint-Julien, with tasting notes stretching back to 1922, and a deliberate choice to leave out numerical scores — a decision Marc says made his writing significantly better.

In this episode:

• How Marc built trust and access inside the châteaux without any formal role in the wine trade
• The "Englishman's Claret" origin story — and the Oxford tasting that first made him think, how can two wines from the same place be so different?
• Why Saint-Julien is the archetypal Bordeaux, and why its lack of a first growth may actually be a strength
• What "the long tour" means as a philosophy — and why asking why matters more than knowing what
• The case for Bordeaux's extraordinary value right now, and where the perception problem still lives
• En primeur: who it works for, who it doesn't, and what he sees changing
• Why he removed scores from the book — and why his tasting notes immediately improved when he did
• Old bottles and what they tell you that recent vintages can't: a scientist's approach to terroir
• The "looking back / looking forward" structure that makes the book a document meant to age
• Saint-Estèphe and Pauillac: the next volumes already underway

Promo: Use code UNCORKING at checkout for 15% off Saint-Julien at the Académie du Vin Library.

https://academieduvinlibrary.com/products/saint-julien-marc-bouffard