This week: Amanda McCrossin —SommVivant — on why the wine industry doesn’t have a simplification problem, ithas a translation problem.

Amanda is a certified sommelier who ran the wine program at PRESS in Napa and has since built an audience of roughly half a million people by making wine feel approachable without dumbing it down. She and Jon talk about her path from a non-drinking household outside Philadelphia to one of America’s great wine lists, why she started filming a winery a day in 2015, how she handles brand partnerships without losing trust,and what she notices standing quietly in an ordinary wine shop — the label doing all the marketing, 91 versus 92 deciding the sale, and shoppers who are moving faster than we think. Plus her fix: a wine store organized around how you actually live.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Four guys at a steakhouse order bourbon, an old fashioned, and a beer — and the guy who actually wants the Barolo orders bourbon anyway.

This week's essay is about that hesitation. Wine is five thousand years old and was never gendered anywhere — until, in about forty years, American culture quietly stamped it pink. Jon walks through the numbers (only ~16% of American men who drink prefer wine; in France and Italy men out-drink women on it), the three forces that did it — marketing, media, and the culture of expertise — and what it's costing everyone, including the women it supposedly belongs to. The fix isn't camo labels and rugged fonts. It's de-gendering wine entirely, and giving everyone permission to not know yet.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

This week: Raj Parr — one of the most influential sommeliers America has produced — on why he left the dining room for the dirt.

Raj ran the wine program for the Michael Mina Restaurant Group, co-founded Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte, helpedlead the push toward balance in California wine, and co-wrote the James Beard Award–winning Sommelier’s Atlas of Taste. Now he farms by hand at Phelan Farms in Cambria. He and Jon trace the improbable path — Calcutta to culinary school,65 rejection-adjacent job offers, a borrowed one-way ticket, and Larry Stone’s blind tastings — then the harder second act: regenerative farming, the one-shot-a-year math of winegrowing, and why the industry’s conversation has shifted from the cellar to the soil.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.