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.

In 1993, a working actor planted five acres of pinot noir at the bottom of the world, in a region most people said was too cold to grow anything serious. His neighbors thought it was ahobby.

Sam Neill died last month, and two completely different sets of obituaries ran for the same man — one for the movie star, one in the wine trade press. This week’s essay is about the secondone, and about the strange arithmetic of a grapevine: plant it today, get nothing for years, and the best fruit arrives long after you might. Which means nobody plants a vine for themselves.

Then a story out of southern Ukraine — a winegrower tending vines with a rocket buried in a row of chardonnay — makesthe point unavoidable. Wheat feeds you this winter. A vine is a bet that there will be winters worth surviving for.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

What did your parents actually drink — not what they taught you about wine, but what was in the fridge? This week is a solo essay about that question, and the pattern it reveals: every generation rejects the wine its parents loved. Jug wine became Robert Parker's scores. The boomers' big Napa Cabs gave way to Gen X skepticism and then the millennial natural-wine rebellion. And now Gen Z, who aren't rejecting a style of wine so much as opting out of wine altogether. Jon walks through why that's happening, why chasing them with cans and edgy labels backfires, and what actually works instead — making space, and getting out of the way. The bottle changes. The table doesn't. New episodes Tuesday mornings.

This week: Karen MacNeil —author of The Wine Bible, creator of WineSpeed, and founder of Come Over October — on the improbable road from a runaway teenager drinking 89-cent Bulgarian reds to the most decorated wine writer in America.

Karen grew up poor in the Nevada desert, ran away at fourteen, and taught herself wine over the cheapest bottles in the shop. She landed in 1970s New York with six dollars, collected 325rejection slips before her first sale, and — to earn a seat tasting with the men who ran wine then — agreed not to speak for six years. She and Jon talk about the book she wished she’d had, why wine education got too standardized, Come Over October, and why wine belongs to well-being and connection, not theabstinence-vs-abuse binary.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

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.