Explore every episode of the podcast The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hallowine Rusty - Sour: Haunted Vineyards, Spooky Pairings, and Cauldron Sangria | 30 oct. 2026 | 00:05:00 | |
@thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Spooky Halloween Tales & Tips from Sour Grapes You Can't Miss! | 24 oct. 2026 | 00:05:36 | |
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: TIMESTAMPS: @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Jeanine Lum - 3rd Bottle Pop the Quiz Fun w Rusty Cellars | 23 oct. 2026 | 00:08:10 | |
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: TIMESTAMPS: @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Can You Ace This Wine Quiz with Victoria Pelletier? | 20 oct. 2026 | 00:08:08 | |
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: TIMESTAMPS: @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Sharks, Dragons, and the Psychology of the Wine Aisle — Karen Green Pt. 3 | 13 oct. 2026 | 00:05:23 | |
Nobody asks whether their shirt won awards — so why does wine need a gold medal before we trust it? In the finale of our conversation, Karen Green pinpoints the answer: a shirt is visible, brandable, easy. Wine carries so much story and mystique that most buyers feel daunted, a little scared even, and that's exactly why validation matters at the shelf. It's also why the UK press can't resist those blind-tasting surveys where an Aldi champagne beats a Grand Cru and everyone gets to ask what the experts really know. Then Karen opens the door on her Tesco years, back when the UK's biggest grocery retailer received products by post and a meeting with her could make or break a brand. She describes range reviews where seven vitamin products became three, suppliers begging not to be delisted — grown men in tears in front of her — and the part she genuinely loved: negotiating hard, pressing brands to invest, to pay for the gondola ends, the middle of the fixture, pay, pay, pay. After a quick transatlantic detour comparing Shark Tank to Dragon's Den, Forrest closes with one final question: has any product nailed its Buyerology on her lately? Her answer is GIMBER, a ginger-based no-low drink she discovered merchandised next to the fresh ginger in the produce aisle — inspirational placement, zero marketing spend — and now buys by the case. She was sipping one during the interview. The full pour, no fluff. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| 400 Bottles, One Choice: What Your Brain Does — Karen Green Pt. 2 | 07 oct. 2026 | 00:05:30 | |
Wine consumption is sliding in the UK, dipping in France, and the newer generation is reaching for alcohol-free alternatives — so Karen Green went looking for no/low wine in the middle of French wine country. She checked four different retailers. Exactly one carried it. As someone who works with the Quality Food and Drink Awards, she was in the room when the drinks category needed a name for the trend, and the answer was apparently obvious to everyone but her: "no-low." In part two of our conversation, Karen takes us inside the moment every wine lover knows — standing at the fixture, staring down 400 bottles, leaving with one. She maps what the trade calls the buyer's journey: whether you arrived because it's Saturday night, because the day went sideways, or because there's a dinner party to impress, that starting point shapes everything that follows. Along the way she explains why nobody buys the cheapest bottle on the shelf (we go two prices down instead), how France organizes wine by domaine while the UK sells by grape, and why a pretty label wins parties more often than anyone admits. She also shares her honest read on how men and women buy differently — we all think we buy logically, she says, but we buy emotionally — and reveals the presentation trick involving kittens that gets audiences in a buying mood before the salient point ever lands. The full pour, no fluff. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| An Executive by 24 — and She Drinks Her Wine W/O Apology Pt. 1-6 | 01 oct. 2026 | 00:27:51 | |
Victoria opens with her own name, because hosts tend to tiptoe around it — P-E-L-L-E-T-I-E-R — and from there the story moves fast. She was an only child, gifted, and a bit of a loner who genuinely liked the solitude. Her bike was the vehicle for all of it: new parks, new kids, streetlights as the only curfew, and the habit that never left her — watching people and inventing stories about them. She got her first real job at eleven at a hair salon, running the front desk, the cash, the appointments, the sweeping, the towels. She was already five foot eight and passed easily for older. Babysitting on the side paid two dollars an hour. At fourteen she became assistant manager at a shoe store, coaching people decades older than she was. She describes herself as turtle shell outside, marshmallow inside — somewhere between don't mess with me and do you want a hug — but she's clear that the shell came later, built out of a belief that leadership meant all business, all the time, mask on, emotions off. She unlearned that. Vulnerability and empathy, she says, are what actually build trust. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Know Your Buyer or Sell Expensive Fruit Juice — Karen Green Pt. 1 | 30 sept. 2026 | 00:05:19 | |
Karen Green has sat on both sides of the buying desk. She started as a retail buyer at Tesco, moved to Boots buying vitamins and supplements, then crossed the table to sell food and drink herself — before a move to the south of France inspired her to pour all of that knowledge into a consultancy and a book. The book is called Buyerology, and the name arrived, as the best ideas do, unexpectedly: on a bus in Reading, when a furniture store called Sofology rolled past the window and lit the spark. In part one of our conversation, Karen breaks down the nuts and bolts of studying the buyer — why understanding how someone buys is the difference between a clear selling message and fumbling around in the dark, and why mass marketing is a losing game for everyone who isn't Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Then she names the mistake she sees constantly, including in wine: founders who build products for themselves and call it a target market, and winemakers who perfect the grape without ever asking who's going to buy the bottle. Her test is disarmingly simple. When a client describes their ideal customer and it sounds suspiciously like the person talking, she tells them exactly what she's thinking: "So that's you." The full pour, no fluff. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| 3rd Bottle: The Wine Cooler Built for Wine, Not Beer Pt. 1-5 | 29 sept. 2026 | 00:28:35 | |
Jeanine Lum never planned to invent anything. She'd been a W2 employee her whole career, spent twenty years in law enforcement, flew part time as a flight attendant for a decade, and had no manufacturing background whatsoever. What she had instead was a series of ruined bottles. One was left behind in a dark car in Paso Robles and pushed its own cork out overnight from heat that wasn't even extreme — she notes that wine starts to suffer around seventy-five degrees, a temperature most people would call comfortable. Another was a cardboard box holding about $1,400 worth of wine that tipped over on a winding road. She went shopping for a fix, spent anywhere from fifty to two thousand dollars a bag, and discovered that every product on the market carried wine without protecting it. The idea that finally worked came from a box of chocolates a friend sent her with an ice pack inside: take the cardboard grid that wine ships in and turn it into a frozen, interlocking chamber @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| There's No Wine Named After Her Yet. Napa, Fix This. Pt. 6 | 28 sept. 2026 | 00:04:10 | |
Forrest closes the series with a true-or-false round, and the fun of it is watching how fast Victoria sorts fact from invention. The executive role at twenty-four is real. The sommelier training in Bordeaux is pure fiction — she went straight into corporate leadership and never detoured. The Turnaround Queen nickname is real too, and when Forrest asks whether that's runway or corporate, she gives the answer nobody expects: corporate, absolutely, though she did walk a runway as a teenager. The turnaround stories are where the episode gets its weight. One came through a consulting engagement with a global organization badly damaged by COVID, whose board mandated thirty percent of the workforce or operating expenses out of the business. She worked directly with the CEO and the board to engineer it. The other is the reason she ended up living in the United States — a company emerging from a dissolved joint venture that rebranded, went public, and then acquired six companies in eighteen months. Compressed, brutal, and exactly the kind of thing she keeps getting called in to do. Then Forrest asks about the TEDx talk, and the tone shifts. She was the opening speaker in Miami on a night themed around resilience, and her definition is more demanding than the usual one. Healthy resilience isn't gritting your teeth and armoring up — she's explicit that a shield of protective armor is not the thing. It's finding a way to process challenge and adversity rather than simply withstand it, and she built a five-step process for doing exactly that. Anyone who heard her story in Part 1 will understand where the framework came from. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| $300 Shared or $15 Alone? — A CEO Answers the Wine Questions Pt. 5 | 25 sept. 2026 | 00:05:05 | |
Victoria planned the whole Napa and Sonoma trip herself, and she planned it strategically — mostly wineries she and Danny already knew and loved, which she cheerfully admits made the buying decisions easy. It had been fifteen years since her last visit, and it was his first time in wine country at all. The surprises came from the edges of her palate. She's a Sauvignon Blanc and Sancerre person who leans into bold Cabernet, and yet she found herself trying Viognier for the first time and tasting Chardonnays she'd normally skip entirely. Some of it she loved immediately. Some of it she suspects she'll grow into. One stop was purely sentimental: the winery whose wine she and Danny served at their wedding. They went back. Their tastes have changed, they don't love it the way they once did, and she says so without any hand-wringing about it. The tasting room she declined to buy from is the more interesting story. The wine was good. The experience felt stale to her, and that was enough. She's an experience person — the same instinct that governs how she picks restaurants, and the same instinct that put her husband in a mud bath in Calistoga so they'd have a story worth telling later. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Critic Who Finally Came Around | Jeanine Pt. 5 | 24 sept. 2026 | 00:06:30 | |
For the finale, Forrest flips the format and puts four multiple-choice questions to Jeanine about the product she spent years building. She handles the first one easily — heat is the enemy, though she notes for the record that she'd prefer to worry about curious seagulls. The quiz opens into the best running conversation of the series, about zippers. Jeanine has strong feelings here, having wrestled with a two-zip cooler that she says takes an act of God to close, and she wants to know whether there's a balance between waterproof and usable. Her own bag runs tight, she admits, which is why it ships with zipper lube — a term Forrest has never heard in his life. She explains the application, then confesses she's only used it once herself. Her husband is the one who bothers. She just muscles it. Forrest catches the shot fired and asks his name, and that's how Jeff ends up mentioned on the podcast. The last question is about freezer discipline, and the answer is all of the above, which leads Jeanine to explain why skipping a pack to make room defeats the purpose — the modular pieces can be repositioned along the bag wall instead of removed, so you keep the full chill while making space for larger bottles or food. Then comes the moment worth staying for. Asked who's been her biggest supporter, Jeanine names her husband, who's watched her stay up half the night with manufacturers. But her biggest critic was her middle daughter, who'd heard years of "I'm going to invent that" and called the ideas silly. When she finally saw this one, she stopped — and thought of every bachelorette party she'd hauled champagne to in a cardboard box. She closes with discount codes for listeners and where to find 3rd Bottle online. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| She Designed It Around TSA Rules | Jeanine Pt. 4 | 22 sept. 2026 | 00:05:11 | |
This is the practical episode. Jeanine walks through what you'll find at 3rdbottle.com: two bags, a six-pack and a twelve-pack, each with the interlocking modular ice packs that lie flat in a freezer. The six-pack holds six to eight hours depending on how well you keep it sealed. You can also buy the ice packs on their own if you already own a cooler tall enough to take a wine bottle — the measurements are posted on the site — though she's careful to say she can't promise chill times in a cooler she didn't design. Every bag ships with the ice packs and a condensation towel, the latter existing purely because the packs sweat a little and she didn't like the small pool of water at the bottom, so she had one made to absorb it. Then Forrest asks the question that opens up the best part of the episode: why fill them with water instead of using the pre-filled gel packs everyone else uses? The answer turns out to have four separate layers. Cost and customs came first — chemical fills are treated differently at the border and would have driven the price up. Performance came second, and this is the part that surprised her: she prototyped with gels, even pulled the beads out of a commercial gel pack and tested them in her own design, and found that plain water chilled just as long. Liability came third. She didn't want to be responsible for a child getting into a broken pack. The fourth reason is the one nobody would predict. She designed the whole system to clear TSA, because she flies to Europe, buys wine, and brings it home in cargo — and she didn't want to stand at a checkpoint answering questions about hazardous chemicals. When Forrest compliments the foresight, she gives it up easily: she used to be a flight attendant, and she heard those speeches every single day. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Tuesday Wine vs. the I-Just-Closed-Something Bottle Pt. 4 | 21 sept. 2026 | 00:04:48 | |
Victoria wrote a book about building a personal brand, and then people kept asking her the same follow-up question: fine, I built it — now what? That question became the sequel. Influence Unleashed taught the construction. Influence Activated teaches what you do once it's standing. Her diagnosis of where most people go wrong is uncomfortable and probably correct: they lead with credentials and industry and job titles, when the truth is people do business with people. She never takes a meeting cold. Prospective hire, new client, old client — she looks them up first, and she assumes they're doing the same to her. That's the whole argument in a sentence. Write your own narrative or accept the one strangers assemble for you. She's honest about using AI, honest about the filters, and firm that none of it works without something real underneath. And she has little patience for the quiet hope so many professionals live on: that doing excellent work will simply be noticed. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Can You Ace the CLINQ ZERO Pop Quiz? Find Out Now! | 19 sept. 2026 | 00:06:32 | |
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: TIMESTAMPS: @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The MBA Means Almost Nothing to Her. Here's What Does Pt. 3 | 18 sept. 2026 | 00:05:42 | |
India, twenty-some years ago: the site manager who addressed her male employee instead of her Aggressive versus assertive — and the word that gets used on women Guilt aimed at driven mothers; Canada's six-month, now one-year, maternity leave Working the day she gave birth to her second child; back at the desk after two weeks "Well, ask a man" Being the only woman in the room, routinely Forrest on golf, the email he never got, and what exclusion feels like from the inside "I drive a mean golf cart and I buy drinks incredibly well" Finding other avenues to build relationships Hiring for real-life experience over polish; MBAs rank low on her list The seven-out-of-ten rule, and the coaching that fills the gap Agility, growth mindset, good humans, good fit #Unstoppable and #NoExcuses — the philosophy in two tags LinkedIn ranked her the #1 social seller worldwide during her IBM years Forrest's promise to the audience: the wine is coming @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| You Missed the Mark on the Wine Industry — Jeanine vs. Hydro Flask Pt. 3 | 17 sept. 2026 | 00:07:04 | |
This part is where the numbers come out. Jeanine wanted twelve to fifteen hours of chill, driven by a specific need: she and her husband keep a second home in Albuquerque, the drive runs through desert heat, and she favors black vehicles, which is one more thing working against the wine in the back. What the finished product actually delivers exceeded her target — the twelve-pack holds for twenty-four hours and beyond, and she's tested it under a truck cover, deliberately engineering a heat trap, across the full twelve-hour run from Orange County to Albuquerque. The six-pack is the short-trip version: picnics, concerts, a day at the beach, six to eight hours as long as you keep it zipped. She also talks about what she had to let go. She wanted a collapsible bag for boats and RVs, and the engineering wouldn't support it — the design couldn't hold temperature. That's the moment, she says, where her stubbornness had to give way to someone who actually knew better. Then there's everyone else. Once word gets out that you're building something, people arrive with suggestions, and Jeanine's response to the two-pack and three-pack crowd is that she's already thought it through — the ice pack system doesn't earn its keep at that size, and plenty of simple bags already exist for a dinner out. Her real problem was never dinner. It was tasting rooms: buying six or nine or twelve bottles, then facing the next winery with nowhere to put them. Her husband wouldn't carry them in and wouldn't leave them in the car. What she needed, as she puts it, was a wine mule. He quit. The centerpiece is her conversation with Travis Rosbach, co-founder of Hydro Flask, who asked her the obvious business question: why rebuild the entire cooler instead of just selling the ice packs? Her answer is the thesis of the whole product. The cooler companies built for beer, and wine bottles are taller. Loose ice chills unevenly and can overchill a bottle, and soaking labels means losing them — which matters not only for knowing what you're drinking but for the artist whose work is on the bottle. Rosbach laughed and conceded the point @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Graduated High School at 16, Bought a House at 19 - Victoria Pt. 2 | 16 sept. 2026 | 00:05:27 | |
The Canadian tell — "out and about" Growing up in Calgary; talked into the University of Calgary at sixteen despite offers elsewhere Scholarship in hand, room and board free, and moving out anyway that first semester Relocated to Toronto straight out of university, later to the US One, two, sometimes three jobs at a time through school: banking, a doctor's office, acting and commercial work Four or five hours of sleep at twenty — and what sleep looks like now Her son's objection: "but then you have no social life" The tuition bargain — maintain the GPA or repay the semester C-suite, decoded: chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and the functions that reported to her Recruited at twenty-four as COO and general manager, three months into new motherhood Everything but finance in her remit, in a lean outsourcing P&L where mistakes cost money Confidence read as competence — "rightfully or wrongfully so" Just over forty M&A and divestiture transactions across the career Twenty-six years in B2B professional services: outsourcing, consulting, technology @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| They're About the Beers and the Bros — Why Wine Coolers Don't Work Pt. 2 | 15 sept. 2026 | 00:05:13 | |
Every product story has a stretch in the middle that nobody puts in the marketing copy, and this is Jeanine Lum's. Her first project manager had never had a drink in his life, which made explaining the value of what she was trying to protect a losing battle from the start. He took her concept, produced designs that failed, then redesigned and remolded without consulting her — and charged her for a new mold every single time. A year and several molds later, she was ready to quit. What she says next is the part that stops you. Twenty years in law enforcement, and she had never cried as much as she did during that first year of design work. She found a second manufacturer, and the difference was immediate: they didn't charge for redesigns, and their engineers apologized for not having reached her solutions first. Three mold revisions, billed once. Running alongside all of it was a patent process that went nearly as badly — the first attorney turned her away claiming a conflict of interest so fast she's certain he never opened her email, the second loved the product but couldn't hold to deadlines, and the third, who also doesn't drink, turned out to be the one who saw it. She now holds a design patent, a utility patent, and two registered trademarks. Then Forrest asks the question that gets to the heart of it, and Jeanine explains the interlocking ice pack system — a modular grid that freezes flat enough to fit an RV freezer, then slides together inside the bag, with pieces you can remove and reposition to make room for food and charcuterie. She designed it that way because she and her husband have lived with small refrigerators on a boat and in an RV, and because the coolers already on the market weren't built with wine in mind at all. Most of them, as she puts it, aren't even tall enough. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Adopted at 4, Unstoppable by 14 - Victoria Pt. 1 | 14 sept. 2026 | 00:06:01 | |
Getting the name right, first thing — P-E-L-L-E-T-I-E-R Only child, gifted kid, self-described loner: the bike as an instrument of exploration Streetlights as the only curfew, and what kids lose without that People-watching from a bicycle seat, and inventing stories about strangers — a habit that never left her First job at eleven: booking appointments, running cash, sweeping floors, laundering towels Babysitting at $2 an hour Assistant manager at fourteen, coaching adults decades older "Turtle shell outside, marshmallow inside — somewhere between don't mess with me and do you want a hug" Why the all-business mask came first, and why vulnerability came later Adopted at four out of a violent early childhood "Tori, you need to do better than us" — and the crucial distinction between better than where I came from and better than any person No money for the high school graduation trip Book 5 is in stores now! @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Wine Mule Replacement: Jeanine Lum's Journey to Building 3rd Bottle Pt. 1 | 10 sept. 2026 | 00:07:18 | |
Jeanine Lum never set out to become an inventor. A W2 employee with no manufacturing background, she stumbled into her business idea the hard way, through a series of wine mishaps that most collectors will wince at. A bottle left in a car in Paso Robles pushed its own cork out from heat. A year later, a cardboard box holding roughly $1,400 worth of wine tipped over on a winding road trip. Those two moments sent her looking for a real solution, and she quickly discovered that nothing on the market actually protected the wine itself, only the bottle. What follows is a candid look at the long road from idea to finished product. Jeanine talks about working with a project manager who had never had a drop of wine in his life and struggled to understand what she was trying to protect, the costly cycle of redesigned molds, and the patent attorneys who came and went before she found the right partner. She eventually landed on an interlocking, modular ice pack system inspired by an ice pack she received in a box of chocolates, built specifically to accommodate the height of wine bottles, something she says most coolers on the market completely ignore. Forrest and Jeanine also dig into the practical side of the product, from the six-pack and twelve-pack ice systems and how long each holds its chill, to the zipper lube that keeps the airtight seal easy to manage, to why she intentionally avoided pre-filled gel packs in favor of simple water. Along the way, she shares a great story about a conversation with Hydro Flask's Travis Rosbach, who admitted his industry had missed the mark entirely on wine drinkers. It's a fun, honest conversation about persistence, unexpected mentors, and building something from a problem nobody else thought to solve. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Can You Ace Pop the Quiz w Justin Ennis? Rusty Cellars | 09 sept. 2026 | 00:06:23 | |
TIMESTAMPS: @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Applied for a "Warm Body" Job 1995. Now He Runs a World-Class Winery Pt. 1-9 | 09 sept. 2026 | 00:41:08 | |
Justin Ennis, Senior Director of Winemaking for Joseph Phelps Vineyards in Sonoma County, responsible for the Sonoma Coast wines under the Freestone brand — a role he's held for 20 years. Justin shares how he grew up surrounded by vineyards, with a wine-loving grandfather on one side and a family vineyard in Healdsburg's Russian River on the other, yet never considered wine a career until his stepfather (then at Kendall-Jackson's Hartford Court) suggested harvest intern work. His first vintage was 1995 under winemaker Dan Goldfield, doing the unglamorous cellar-rat work: power washing, punch downs, barrel cleaning. The revelation? Working alongside interns from Portugal, France, and Australia through the CAEP agricultural exchange visa program — and realizing winemaking could be his passport to the wider world. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Engineer Who Built CLINQ ZERO - Inside the Wine Industry Pt. 1-5 | 08 sept. 2026 | 00:24:35 | |
From a family bakery in Sicily to founding a non-alcoholic wine brand in Dallas, Anto's path to CLINQ ZERO runs through aerospace engineering, Fiat, agriculture, Tetra Pak, and five years selling winery equipment across North America. In this full conversation with Forrest, Anto shares the story behind the CLINQ ZERO name, the mixed reaction from friends and family back in Italy where wine tradition runs deep, and the process that sets the brand apart: starting from premium wine, dealcoholizing at ambient temperature, and skipping the sugar and artificial flavoring most competitors rely on to mask what's lost. The conversation also covers the bigger picture — alcohol consumption dropping globally, the opportunity that creates for non-alcoholic wine, and CLINQ ZERO's three-variety lineup of Sparkling Blanc, Sparkling Rosé, and Sparkling Red, available in both glass bottle and can. Anto closes with his five-year vision: CLINQ ZERO as the brand people keep in the fridge for weddings, baby showers, and pizza night, with founder pricing available now on pre-order ahead of late-summer delivery. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Winemaker on the Hot Seat: 10 Rapid-Fire Questions, Zero Hesitation Pt. 9 | 07 sept. 2026 | 00:04:52 | |
The rapid-fire rundown: Joe Phelps began his search for the perfect cool-climate site in the 90s. The two estate vineyards behind the vineyard-designate wines are Quarter Moon and Pastorale. Before this year's national release, the wines were only available winery direct or through the Phelps Preferred membership. The 2024 Pastorale Chardonnay carries an oceanic signature — Forrest's notes say saline breezes, Justin says salt air, and they call it close enough. That leads to the best moment of the episode: Justin admits even winemakers struggle with wine adjectives. His advice? If something creates thought provocation and you keep wanting to drink it, that's the clear-cut sign of quality. Skip the fluffy wine words. Make it accessible for everyone — which is exactly what The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is all about. More from the hot seat: Joseph Phelps joined the Moët Hennessy side of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) in 2022 — the LV side is fashion and perfume, Moët Hennessy is wine and spirits. The two natural forces shaping the Freestone microclimate: the Pacific Ocean and the Petaluma Gap, funneling marine air and fog into Sonoma County. The tiny town of Freestone sits off a quiet highway heading toward Bodega Bay. Joseph Phelps farms roughly 500 acres across nine estate vineyards. The most accessible bottle in the lineup, the 2023 Freestone Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, comes in at $75. And the 2023 Quarter Moon Pinot? For lovers of savory texture, depth, and ageability. Mic drop. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Brand That Wants to Replace Your Soda- CLINQ ZERO Pt. 5 | 03 sept. 2026 | 00:06:04 | |
What does success actually look like five years into building a non-alcoholic wine brand? For Anto, founder of CLINQ ZERO, it's simple: becoming the bottle people keep in the fridge for weddings, baby showers, and pizza nights — and converting soda and beer drinkers to sparkling red along the way. In this final installment, Anto talks candidly about life after two decades in the corporate world, why he genuinely enjoys talking to strangers about the brand, and what separates CLINQ ZERO's ingredient list from competitors that compensate for lost flavor with sugar. He also shares the practical details: the Sparkling Blanc is available for pre-order now at CLINQ ZERO, with delivery expected late summer, and early supporters can lock in founder pricing — 30% off, the lowest price the brand will ever offer. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Wine That Goes With Everything (According to the Man Who Makes It) Pt. 8 | 02 sept. 2026 | 00:06:08 | |
Why Pinot Noir? For Justin, it's the flavor and the challenge — a difficult grape to grow and a difficult wine to make, which makes a phenomenal vintage from Quarter Moon or Pastorale that much sweeter. He believes with every fiber of his body that Pinot Noir is one of the most food-friendly wines on the planet: it ages beautifully, but you can drink it young and still sense the quality. Having your cake and eating it too. Justin's advice for anyone just getting into wine: starting with a price point is fine, but don't stop there. Get out of your comfort zone and be willing to spend a little more — that's how you discover the full range of quality out there. He's watched friends do exactly that with Freestone wines, and the reaction is always the same: holy cow. Then the news — this year Freestone made its first small domestic release of the single-vineyard wines into the national market. The Pastorale Pinot Noir, Quarter Moon Pinot Noir, and Pastorale Chardonnay are now in 11 markets including New York, Chicago, and Florida (Miami, Orlando, Tampa) — roughly 500 cases each, pulled from the Phelps Preferred club allocation. Justin explains the direct-to-consumer double-edged sword: it's the most profitable route, but the greater world doesn't know you exist. Long-term growth means getting into top accounts and top restaurants — slowly and consistently. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Three Products Launching Under CLINQ ZERO Pt. 4 | 01 sept. 2026 | 00:05:09 | |
Did you know San Pellegrino comes out of the ground already sparkling? Anto shares that detail in this CLINQ ZERO conversation, right before walking through the brand's full product lineup: Sparkling Blanc, Sparkling Rosé, and Sparkling Red, each offered in a traditional 750ml glass bottle and a 12-ounce can. The two also dig into why cans resonate with consumers who want portion control — no recorking, no spilling, just a controlled pour, hot or cold. Anto explains his bigger vision for the sparkling red as a potential alternative to soda or sparkling water, and reflects on what's been most satisfying about building in a growing category: the curiosity from consumers, and CLINQ ZERO's mission to bring transparency to a space where not every brand is being honest about what's really in the bottle. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Real Price of Wine: 401ks, Living Wages, 35 Sprays a Season Pt. 7 | 31 août 2026 | 00:05:11 | |
Forrest asks the question wine lovers wonder in the store aisle: what's the story behind the price? Justin lays it out plainly. Freestone employs its own in-house vineyard staff of 12 to 15 people — with benefits, 401k match, retirement, vacation, and paid holidays. That's high-touch, high-detail farming, and it's part of every bottle's price. Lower-priced wines often farm vastly differently: farming for quantity, machine harvesting, contracted labor instead of in-house crews. Location matters too. The Sonoma Coast's proximity to the ocean means protecting the fruit can take dramatically more vineyard passes than warmer inland sites — Justin ballparks 35 sprays versus maybe 10 on the Napa Valley floor. Add barrel programs like 100% French oak, and the true cost of a bottle comes into focus. Then Forrest asks the emotional question: does it ever get old watching someone taste your wine for the first time? Never, says Justin. Memories are created over the wines his team makes — and humans have been fermenting and gathering around the table since we started walking the planet. A meal, an amazing bottle, and laughs: the communal ritual we should never lose. And his favorite from the lineup? No hesitation: "Pinot Noir is my amour." His deserted-island wine, through and through — with a deep love of Chardonnay right behind it. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Reason CLINQ ZERO Comes in a Can AND a Bottle Pt. 3 | 27 août 2026 | 00:05:01 | |
What actually gets removed when you dealcoholize wine — and what gets left behind? In Part 3 of this CLINQ ZERO conversation, founder Anto explains how the distillation-based process specifically targets alcohol molecules, leaving natural compounds like resveratrol intact, without leaning on artificial wine flavoring to fake what's lost. He also covers the regulatory upside of going alcohol-free: no distributor required, no age-21 disclaimer, and a direct-to-consumer model that's opened the door for CLINQ ZERO to sell straight to customers in the U.S. Anto gets candid about the bigger picture too — alcohol consumption is dropping globally, and he sees non-alcoholic wine as both an opportunity for the wine industry and a chance to chip away at the stigma still attached to the category. The episode wraps with the thinking behind CLINQ ZERO's packaging: a glass bottle for celebratory, premium occasions, and a can built for tailgates, beaches, and anywhere glass isn't practical. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Why He Lets Pinot Ferment Wild but Never Chardonnay Pt. 6 | 26 août 2026 | 00:04:56 | |
Forrest asks the question on everyone's mind: is AI finding its way into the vineyard? Justin embraces technology on the business side — presentations, emails, efficiency — and sees real potential in equipment applications like smarter sorting and earlier detection in the vineyard. But when it comes to handcrafting wine, he's protective. To Justin, AI is a recipe: put in the parameters, get a result. Wine's beauty lives in vintage variation, challenging seasons, and a little chaos. Strip out the creativity and you're making formulaic, boring wines. Then the conversation turns to Justin's minimalist, low-intervention style. His philosophy: high-detail, attentive farming delivers fruit so good the wines nearly make themselves. He picks for natural acid and alcohol balance and avoids additions when he can — not hands-off, not lazy, just letting the vintage and the site dictate quality instead of heavy-handed winemaking. One fascinating detail: the Pinot Noir ferments naturally on native yeast, but the Chardonnay gets inoculated — because every time he's let Chardonnay go wild, the fermentation got stuck. Adapting to what the circumstances give you, in action. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| The Process Behind CLINQ ZERO Will Surprise You Pt. 2 | 25 août 2026 | 00:06:19 | |
Why does a wine with no alcohol cost more to make, not less? In Part 2 of this CLINQ ZERO conversation, founder Anto walks Forrest through the real economics and technology behind the brand. The name itself carries meaning — "clink" for the universal, joyful sound of a toast, "zero" borrowed from the soda world's shorthand for "without." Anto shares how the idea landed with friends and family in Italy, where tradition runs deep and non-alcoholic wine was a hard sell, even to his own mother. He also details the process that separates CLINQ ZERO from other dealcoholized wines on the market: starting from premium wine, processing at ambient temperature with no heat damage to aroma or flavor, and avoiding the sugar and natural flavoring most competitors add back in to compensate. A touch of CO2 for the sparkle and a hint of grape juice to balance acidity — that's it. Real sparkling wine, gently dealcoholized. Not a shortcut, not a compromise.
If you are looking for an exciting podcast check out - Nicholas Kuhne in Norway, as he delves deep into the realms of digital marketing, branding, and entrepreneurship. Explore the global perspectives of industry titans. In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, this podcast is your reliable compass. A journey into the heart of digital marketing and branding. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| 2 Vineyards, 1 Winemaker — Why the Wines Taste Nothing Alike Pt. 5 | 24 août 2026 | 00:05:16 | |
Justin breaks down what's actually in the glass — Pastorale Pinot Noir is fruit-forward and flashy with red cherry and strawberry notes and a long finish, while Quarter Moon, sitting closer to the ocean and the Petaluma Gap, leans Old World: spicier, darker, with bigger tannins and more structure. Thicker skins and smaller clusters mean a higher skin-to-juice ratio in the fermenter, and deeper color in the bottle. Same farming, same winemaking — the site does the talking. On Chardonnay, Justin makes what he calls "varietally correct" Chardonnay: high-acid, fruit-driven, fermented in large-format oak so the wood supports the wine without smothering it. No butter bombs here. Then Forrest asks the hard question: is there anything positive to take away from a decade of California wildfires? Justin is candid — nothing positive except the lessons. He recounts the 2017 Tubbs fire that shattered his sense of the industry's invincibility, and the 2020 LNU Lightning Complex fires that forced Freestone to abandon its entire harvest. Grapes breathe, smoke binds into the berry, and those burnt flavors can't be removed — so rather than compromise quality standards, they walked away from the vintage. And he throws no shade at winemakers who made a different call to keep their businesses afloat. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Sicily to Dallas: CLINQ ZERO Saw the Gap in the Wine Industry Pt. 1 | 20 août 2026 | 00:05:19 | |
Most people who launch a non-alcoholic wine brand come at it from the wellness world, the beverage startup world, or the "I gave up drinking and couldn't find anything good" world. Anto Li Brizzi came at it from none of those places. He came at it from the winery floor. As head of North America for an Italian capital equipment company, Anto spent years selling the machinery that wineries use to make wine. He understood the production process, the industry dynamics, and the category from the inside out. When he saw the opportunity to build a better non-alcoholic sparkling wine — one that starts as real wine and is gently dealcoholized rather than constructed from juice, sugar, and flavoring — he had the knowledge and the credibility to do it right. In this first episode, Forrest traces Anto's full origin story:
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| Why Joseph Phelps Expanded to the Sonoma Coast — Freestone Vineyards w/ Justin Ennis Pt. 4 | 19 août 2026 | 00:04:54 | |
Justin Ennis explains that you can't talk about Napa Valley's red table wine history without talking about Joe Phelps, who founded Joseph Phelps Vineyards in 1973 after building a national construction company, Hensel Phelps, with his father's business out of Greeley, Colorado. Phelps released the first vintage of Insignia in 1974, Napa's first Bordeaux-style blend, and was also among the first to varietally label Syrah in California after Prohibition. Working alongside his first winemaker, German immigrant Walter Shug, Phelps experimented widely across varietals including Riesling, Johannesburg Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Syrah, tearing out plantings that didn't meet his standard and starting over until he found the quality he wanted. Justin connects this same relentless pursuit of excellence to the founding of Freestone Vineyards, born from Phelps' love of Burgundy wines and his desire to make a true Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in a cooler climate. That search led the Phelps team to the West Sonoma Coast, where they planted two estate vineyards, Pastoral at 60 acres and Quarter Moon at 40, totaling 100 acres roughly seven to eight miles from Bodega Bay and the Pacific Ocean, complete with a separate winemaking facility and staff dedicated entirely to the Freestone project. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Maryse Wrote the Book on Wine Smart — Now Take the Quiz | 18 août 2026 | 00:05:26 | |
Rusty Cellars is back behind the quiz desk, and this time the subject is the one guest who literally wrote the book on wine talk. Maryse Chevriere — certified sommelier, illustrator, and James Beard Award winner for the gloriously funny @FreshCutGardenHose — gets the full Pop the Quiz treatment as Rusty turns her interview series into two rounds of trivia and translation. Round one tests how closely you listened: her grape-stomping fall in Alsace, the humor award she won as an illustrator among writers, the Ian Cauble "fresh cut garden hose" line that named her brand, learning to drive at fifteen in Houston, and the all-Riesling wine list that gave her a big break in New York. Round two flips the glass and quizzes the language itself, busting the cork-sniffing ritual, decoding what legs really reveal, defending screw caps, and translating what "approachable" actually means when a sommelier says it with a smile. It's the perfect capper to the Maryse series and a 5-minute crash course in sounding wine smart without a single ounce of snobbery. Tally your score, grab the book, and pour something friendly. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| 32 Harvests, Here's the Real Path - Justin Ennis Pt. 3 | 17 août 2026 | 00:05:37 | |
Justin Ennis explains that his path into winemaking didn't run through a four-year degree program, but through 32 harvests of hands-on, ground-up learning that started at age 19 with the least glamorous jobs in the building: cleaning tanks, floors, drains, and barrels. From there, progression came step by step, learning to run the crush pad, organize the barrel room, and operate equipment like pumps, forklifts, and cranes before eventually taking on bigger responsibility. He stresses that interns benefit most from working at high-quality, technique-focused wineries rather than high-volume producers, since that's where the best habits get built. Justin describes winemaking as a true lifestyle career rather than a 9-to-5 job, comparing it to professional sports in terms of the all-in commitment it demands, since farming and winemaking run year-round with no real clocking out. He wraps up by walking through the cyclical rhythm of his year, from the relatively quiet stretch of leafing, shoot positioning, and crop estimating in the vineyard right now, to the upcoming July bottling and the harvest prep that follows, all while Mother Nature ultimately dictates the timeline. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Premium Blend Is Giving Away Product — For the Best Possible Reason | 15 août 2026 | 00:03:14 | |
Henry Santos of Premium Blend joins Forrest to talk about Raise a Glass for Colombia, the company's earthquake relief campaign. Premium Blend has deep roots in the Colombian community, and just two months before the earthquake they launched Brisa Ardiente, a wine-based Colombian aguardiente created with the community's support. Now they're giving back in a big way. Henry explains that the campaign has grown beyond its original scope: rather than just Colombian restaurants, Premium Blend is challenging all of its customers to host a one-evening fundraising event and dedicate cocktail proceeds to earthquake victims. Premium Blend supplies the product to make those cocktails at no cost, and the company has opened its Miami warehouse as a receiving center for donations being gathered and shipped to Colombia. Henry also shares the good news that his friends and contacts in Colombia are safe, while acknowledging that not everyone was so fortunate. Restaurant and bar owners can get involved by visiting premiumblend.com or calling 800-899-0331 and asking for the Colombia package. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| From the Vault: Keith Urban, Golden Road Era Pt. 3 — The Finale | 15 août 2026 | 00:03:53 | |
Then things get playful: Keith cheerfully ad-libs an Outback Steakhouse tagline ("Crikey, I just threw that one in myself"), before a rapid-fire lightning round turns up Citizen Kane, a love of tattoos, chocolate over vanilla, and his dad as his athletic hero. He signs off by picking Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me — the same song that opens his show every night — ahead of the Farmhand benefit at the House of Blues in Anaheim. A warm, funny, generous farewell to a genuine star on the rise. Show notes
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| Why Every Winemaker Needs To Travel First - Justin Ennis Pt. 2 | 12 août 2026 | 00:04:52 | |
Justin Ennis dives into the long tradition of international exchange programs in winemaking, where interns and foreign workers move between wineries to share techniques, equipment innovations, and processes that have developed differently across regions. He recalls starting in the cellar at eighteen years old, working alongside people from completely different countries, languages, and backgrounds, and how that experience opened his eyes to how much more there was to learn beyond what he'd seen at home. Justin challenges the assumption that American winemaking is automatically the best, pointing out that Old World regions like France have been refining their craft for centuries longer. He explains why harvest season, typically August through October, requires an expanded labor pool and round-the-clock monitoring of fermentations as fruit comes in at all hours. He also talks about why internships matter so much for young people entering the industry, giving them a low-stakes way to explore winemaking, vineyard work, hospitality, or sales before committing to one path, and how he now gets to pass that same mentorship forward at his own winery. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Wine-Based Cocktails, a Cuban Escape — Premium Blend Pt. 1-5 | 11 août 2026 | 00:27:25 | |
What does it take to build a 35-year-old spirits brand from scratch when nobody believes in your product, you have no industry experience, and a liquor license costs seven figures in your market? Ask Gino Santos. Premium Blend Cocktails for one of the most wide-ranging, personal, and genuinely fascinating guest conversations in TB5MWP history. The Business Concept Premium Blend produces wine-based spirits that are legally classified as wine — meaning any venue holding a basic beer and wine license (as low as $400 in Florida) can serve them. No six-figure liquor license required. The products are formulated to taste like the spirits they replicate: tequila, rum, vodka, mezcal, and more — and when mixed into cocktails, they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The Product Line The flagship Agave Wine Collection is made from 100% blue agave sourced in Jalisco, Mexico — the same region as the world's finest tequilas — and includes Tequesta, Ginete (blanco-style), Guitarron, Guitarron Classico (reposado-style), Zapotec (mezcal-style), and El Guitarron Cristalino. At 48 proof, the line has evolved from a cocktail mixer into a sipping spirit in its own right. Additional products include Rumbero (rum-style), Clear Red (vodka-style), Santos Sangria (100% Spanish origin, grandmother's family recipe), Failing Irish Cream (produced in Ireland), and Cafe Luna coffee liqueur. A new Aguardiente (Colombian-style spirit) is also in the pipeline. The Origin Story Gino and his brother Henry were born in Cuba. Their father Orestes — a celebrated Cuban singer-songwriter — was anti-Castro, thrown in jail, and eventually escaped with his family on a shrimp boat stolen by an uncle. The U.S. Coast Guard rescued them mid-ocean as the boat was sinking, bringing them ashore in Key West to sandwiches and cold milk. From Newark to Miami, through Stetson University and an MBA from the University of Miami, Gino ended up on the road selling Oscar Mayer products when he spotted a wine-based spirit that no one was marketing correctly. He and Henry saw the gap and built Premium Blend to fill it. The Pitch and the Hustle The early years meant self-distribution across Florida in plastic bottles (glass breaks; plastic doesn't), cold-calling venues with no distributor support, and doing trade show samplings to get skeptical buyers to try the product. The sales pitch Gino still stands behind: Premium Blend increases your margins, improves customer retention, and makes your wait staff more money — all without a liquor license. Blind taste tests against actual rum and tequila have been closing deals ever since. The Legacy Gino closes the series reflecting on his late father Orestes, who told his sons when they arrived in America: "We didn't come here to take, we came here to give." Premium Blend now employs a team, operates in multiple states, and has helped countless small restaurants stay in business on the strength of their cocktail margins alone. 📞 Premium Blend toll-free: 800-899-0331 🌐 premiumblend.com @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| 1 Harvest Changed Everything: Freestone Winemaker Justin Ennis's Sonoma Coast Story Pt. 1 | 10 août 2026 | 00:04:38 | |
Justin Ennis, senior director of winemaking for Joseph Phelps Vineyards and the steward of its Freestone brand along the Sonoma Coast, where he's spent the last twenty years shaping the wines. Justin grew up surrounded by wine without ever planning to make a career of it — his grandfather kept a full table, and his mother's family in Healdsburg tended an old field-planted vineyard in the heart of the Russian River Valley. It wasn't until his stepfather, who worked facilities at what's now Hartford Family Winery, nudged him toward a harvest internship that everything changed. Justin signed on as cellar help for his first vintage in 1995 under winemaker Dan Goldfield, expecting little more than hard, unglamorous labor: power washing, barrel cleaning, and punch-downs. What he found instead reshaped his entire worldview. That first harvest, he worked alongside cellar hands from Portugal, France, and Australia, brought to the United States through agricultural exchange visa programs like CAEP. For a young guy from what he calls an "insular" Sonoma County, the camaraderie and global perspective of harvest work opened a door he hadn't known existed — one that would eventually take him as far as New Zealand using that same visa program. Justin reflects on falling into winemaking purely by chance, simply applying for a job that needed warm bodies, and discovering a calling he never set out to find. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Keith Urban: Golden Road Interview — Guitar Heroes & Hidden Tracks Pt. 2 | 08 août 2026 | 00:05:37 | |
Keith talks his TV run on Leno and The View, a fan poll that had him wanting to see him on the big screen (right behind Faith Hill), and previews the next single, Raining on Sunday, written by Radney Foster and Darrell Brown. Keith geeks out over guitar heroes Lindsey Buckingham and Mark Knopfler, his love of Bob Seger, and reveals the surprising story behind But for the Grace of God — co-written with two members of the Go-Go's. A warm, funny, guitar-obsessed snapshot of Keith Urban on the rise. Show notes (timestamped highlights)
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| New Products, World Cup, Holiday Table: Premium Blend's Next Chapter Pt. 5 | 06 août 2026 | 00:05:53 | |
Thirty-five years. Same 800 number. Still picking up. That's Premium Blend in a nutshell — built on relationships, consistency, and a product that just keeps finding new audiences. In this final episode of the series, Gino Santos gives Forrest a full picture of where the brand is headed and what it looks like at home. Highlights include:
A fitting close to a five-part series packed with business insight, immigrant grit, family pride, and genuinely great product storytelling. 📞 Premium Blend toll-free: 800-899-0331 🌐 premiumblend.com @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Greets You With… But Hits You in the Face: Inside Wine Drawings Everyone Loves Pt. 6 | 05 août 2026 | 00:06:27 | |
Maryse Chevriere's illustrations — a little figure she simply calls "my little dude." He's intentionally universal, someone anyone can see themselves in, though she'll add a ponytail, a bow tie, or a mustache when a drawing calls for it. Forrest zeroes in on a favorite: a "greets you with… but hits you in the face" illustration featuring the character at a microphone under a spotlight, arms up as if shielding himself. Maryse explains the improv-style thinking behind it — "greets you with" is the chill, gentle version of describing a wine's notes, while "hits you in the face" is the version where lemon, lime, and green bell pepper smack you so hard you can't miss it. The whole thing is built around a punchy Sauvignon Blanc (or, in Forrest's Boston translation, a "Savvy B"). Then the practical heart of the episode: who is the book for? Maryse describes it as ideal for newer wine appreciators looking to level up, or anyone who wants a fun, flip-through companion for a glass of wine — originally imagined as a coffee-table book. It's rich with 101-level information, but polished enough that professionals will recognize their own wine-speak and chuckle. Above all, it's a wine book that doesn't feel like a textbook, and a great gift for anyone who loves wine. Maryse takes the open mic to acknowledge the people behind the book: her mom, aunt, and in-laws (who bought and promoted copies), her publishers who finally saw a vision she'd carried for years, her friends Annie, Jess, and Laura, and especially her husband, who held her together while she wrote and illustrated the book through her pregnancy. There's a warm, funny riff about family members enthusiastically promoting her at local wine shops — her mom being the biggest cheerleader of all — and even getting her book and drawings into a charity silent auction. She closes with where to find everything: Instagram at Freshcutgardenhose, prints and custom work at fcghstudio.com, and the book at Amazon, local bookshops, and Barnes & Noble — or search "How to Sound Wine Smart" at SimonandSchuster.com for every retailer. A warm, generous send-off to a standout series. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| We Didn't Come Here to Take, We Came Here to Give" — Gino & His Father's American Dream Pt. 4 | 04 août 2026 | 00:06:14 | |
Every great business has a moment when the founder walks into a stranger's establishment and has to sell the dream from scratch. For Gino Santos, that pitch had three parts: increase your margins, keep your customers coming back, and make your wait staff more money — all with just a beer and wine license. In this final installment of the Premium Blend series, Forrest gets the full story:
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| Certified Som Flashcards to James Beard Award — Maryse Origin Story Pt. 5 | 03 août 2026 | 00:06:16 | |
The series wraps by going back to the beginning. Maryse Chevriere opens with the closure debate and dismantles an old-school myth: you absolutely can have great wine under a screwcap — some of the world's best Rieslings are sealed that way. She gets the confusion, since screwcaps are also a cheaper closure found on inexpensive bottles, but her position is simple: if the wine is good, she doesn't care how it's sealed. Corkscrews have more flair, sure, and she offers a pro tip on the trickier wax-topped bottles — drive the corkscrew straight in rather than trying to peel all the wax off first. Then a quiz question with real teaching value: when an expert calls a wine "approachable," they mean it's easy to drink and enjoyable right now — friendly, no curveballs. Not a polite way of saying cheap, though your greatest Barolo, Bordeaux, or Champagne probably isn't "approachable" in the same way. Think Tuesday-night wine rather than Friday date-night bottle. Maryse also shares the human side: the close-minded customer she'd love to secretly test with a box wine, her genuine modesty about calling herself an illustrator ("I like to draw... it was a hobby"), and the James Beard Award she won in the humor category for the media awards — standing out as an illustrator among writers. The payoff is the full-circle reveal. Forrest plays a mystery voice, and Maryse immediately identifies Master Sommelier Ian Cauble. It turns out her whole project traces back to him. While studying for her certified sommelier exam and clicking around Instagram, she was struck by how visually evocative — and delightfully silly — wine language can be. Coming to wine a little later herself and not always feeling like she fit in with the somm crowd, she found her own way to contribute. And Ian's iconic line — that a wine tastes like fresh cut garden hose — was so perfect it named the whole thing. A fitting finale for the Wine-Curious: proof that the most memorable wine language comes from having fun with it. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Keith Urban: The Golden Road Interview — From the Vault Pt. 1 | 01 août 2026 | 00:06:28 | |
In Part 1, Keith laughs through a surprise call to a bed-and-breakfast in his hometown of Caboolture, Australia (where the locals are more sure about the Crocodile Hunter than the future superstar), talks about flying his mum and dad over for the CMAs, and admits the Aussie beers he still misses back in the States. He opens up about the Farmhand drought-relief broadcast beamed to Australia via satellite, his love of Farm Aid and Willie Nelson, and where his best song ideas tend to strike — the shower. Plus a caller phones in about the Somebody Like You video with Niki Taylor. A warm, funny, genuine snapshot of Keith Urban on the rise. Show notes (timestamped highlights)
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| 100% Blue Agave in Jalisco — But It's Not Tequila. Premium Blend Product Line Revealed Pt. 3 | 30 juil. 2026 | 00:05:49 | |
What started as a workaround for the cocktail licensing gap has evolved into something much bigger. Premium Blend's Agave Wine Collection isn't just a tequila substitute anymore — California restaurants are doing bottle service with it, customers are taking shots, and people are drinking it straight because at 48 proof, it's smoother with none of the burn. In this episode, Gino Santos walks Forrest through:
The product has come a long way since the trade show days of convincing skeptics one sip at a time. Learn more at premiumblend.com @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||
| Good Legs and Sniffing the Cork: Wine Myths a Somm Wants Gone Pt. 4 | 29 juil. 2026 | 00:06:14 | |
Maryse Chevriere a five-question, multiple-choice wine quiz, and her answers double as a myth-busting crash course. Why do sommeliers have you taste before pouring the full glass? To check whether the wine is corked or flawed — and, honestly, to catch whether you simply don't like it. Maryse would rather figure that out early, pour the bottle by the glass, and steer you toward something you'll love than watch you pay for a bottle you'll never finish. And that returned bottle needn't go to waste: if it isn't faulty, let the staff taste it so they can sell it by the glass as a special. Everybody wins. "Good legs"? It's about sugar and alcohol content — not quality, not price, and definitely not a Boston Marathon qualifying time. Maryse calls it a phrase you don't really need anymore, though it opens a lovely tangent about her dad, an old-school wine lover whose family hailed from Bordeaux and who was sure those were simply the best wines there were. As she learned the subject herself, she realized his confidence came from a narrow lens — but he enjoyed wine and had a good time, and sometimes that's its own kind of bliss. Why swirl? To release the aromas — the contact with air wakes the wine up. She half-loves Forrest's alternate theory that you're summoning the flavor gods. On tasting technique, she suggests drawing in a little air like sipping through a mini cocktail straw (no gargling required) and letting the wine touch all points of your palate, since you taste different things in different places — without getting too fancy about it. And sniffing the cork? Mostly theater. A cork smells like cork. If you want to know whether a wine is tainted, smell the wine in the glass, not the stopper — a lesson she picked up early in her training. For the Wine-Curious listener, it's five minutes of permission to stop being intimidated by the rituals — and to understand what's worth doing and what's just for show. @thebestwinepod Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. | |||