This week: Michael Amorosia — founder of The Amorosia Cellar and former frontman of the faceless hardcore band REACTIONS — on why “wine is failing the room,” and how to make it the move for the next generation.

Michael went from covering his face on stage (so fans reacted to the music, not the image) to putting a face on a wine industry that’s been faceless forever. A whiskey guy who fell for wineon a delayed-honeymoon Napa trip, he now argues that wine has been turned into a test — credentials, vocabulary, performance — when it should be a bottle at the table that opens your night. He and Jon talk aspiration vs. accessibility, what the U.S. can learn from Europe, and how to build a room newcomers actually want to walk into.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

The most personal essay Jon has shared on this show.

It starts at a graduation — a giant fairground hall, his son crossing a stage on a monitor from thirty rows back, eighteen years condensed into a four-second walk. After the ceremony, Jon drove back to a Hilton Garden Inn next to a freeway because he'd sold the house. His ex-wife turned to him and said, "I don't know what to do." Neither did he.

Out of that quiet came this essay — about the three stages of a life. The first: dreaming, pure desire for a life you haven't lived yet. The second: building — career, kids, marriage, the years you stop asking "what do I want?" and start asking "what do I need to do?" And the third — the one English calls "empty nest" and Spanish calls tercera edad — the stage without a real name, where the obligations lift and the dreams come back.

Jon walks through all three using wine as the through-line: grape, barrel, bottle. He talks about law school, a freezing Maryland harvest, COVID-era Burgundy obsessions, his mother's three stages (Chicago, Cleveland, and an Arizona realtor's license with a biker boyfriend), Colombia and two-and-a-half-hour meals, a lake house he's building mostly as a trick to see his grandkids more — and a wine bar he didn't need, but wanted.

This is the origin episode. The one that explains the person behind all the others.

"The grape doesn't know it's going to be wine. The barrel doesn't know what it's building. But the bottle is where it all makes sense."

Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

This week: Hillary Cole — former Air Force intelligence officer and author of Vineyards of War — on what wine and warfare have always had in common.Hilary spent ten years in intelligence (a Russian linguist reassigned to counterterrorism on 9/11) before a glass of Barolo rerouted her life into wine. Now a French wine scholar living in Albania, she joins Jon to talk about reading a wine the way she once read a battlespace: why Champagne became the drink of celebration in a region leveled by war every century, theKosovo full-circle moment that bookended her two careers, and why she teaches beginners structure and history instead of tasting notes — because “tasting notes can’t give youhumanity.”

New episodes Tuesday mornings.