What wine podcasts are you listening to?

I’ve been enjoying Wine Blast with Susie and Peter. Seems good shows are few and far between. Would love tips for more!

Wine for Normal People Doug Shafer The Taste

Wine for normal people and some Jasper Morris episodes.

X chateau is one i listen to. It’s more business side though, less with winemakers etc

It doesn’t count if you’re only listening to the episode you were on though.

Sommtv pod

Mainly:

Levi:

and

Japser:

I wish Jasper would upgrade the quality of the feed from the Hong Kong crowd… it’s a great podcast though.

I’ll Drink to That had to be the best out there. Here are a few more not listed above.

GuildSomm
Inside Winemaking with Jim Duane
The Grape Nation

For Oregon:
Oregon Wine History Archive
WeinNotes
Wine Crush

The quality is indeed not always great as it’s recorded for his YouTube channel and zoom (?) is used.

Btw, usually quite fun interaction with the HK crew and interesting questions and insider remarks coming from those interactions.

Bedrock, XChateau, and Somm TV are the ones that have made it in to my podcast rotation.

I want to listen to Wine for Normal People. I love the content but the way they edit the silence and pauses out (too many podcasts do this) makes it all but unlistenable for me. Worse, on good headphones because the software they use doesn’t smooth out pops in the cut - so there are constant little pops all of the time.

My advice to any Podcaster - please stop it. It’s not natural to have zero silence in a conversation. The human brain does need those pauses for the mind to absorb the info. And if you are doing videos - it just makes you look like Max Headroom

I just listened to the February 4, 2022, interview of Mr Jake Neustadt on The Wine Makers pocast (Radio Misfits).

Jake Neustadt is the head viticulturalist for Bedrock Wine Co. He recently began Soleras del Pacifico, an operation specializing in solera-style fortified wine using old-vine Palomino grapes from the “Evangelho Vineyard”.

SommTV is pretty entertaining

Yep. And also somehow they get on my nerves a bit. It depends on the topic. She’s very opinionated, which is fine, but one shouldn’t write off whole regions or generalize too much, unless you’ve really done a very deep dive over many years…. I prefer something like “my exploration of X has revealed Y” vs. “these wines are X…”

• Personally I much prefer the edited/cleaned up versions of podcasts. I pretty much won’t listen to those that don’t get a little scrubbing. There were some early pandemic ones that after I got 5 minutes in, I just marked ‘completed’ and moved on. Especially the ilk of Zoom recycles.

• Wine For Normal People is ‘ok’ but I find the most vexing thing is how much the host basically asks leading questions and expects guests to reconfirm her biases. It’s more like political talk radio. It would be better to talk about the pros and cons and various wine making choices rather than whatever absolutist one size fits all solution they believe in. Also, the show is fairly promotional of whatever is being hawked at the moment (and that shifts as sponsors wax and wane).

• Retailer Paul K of Wine of the Month Club has a cast called Wine Talks, which I have found to be surprisingly good. He has a great radio voice, it seems to be edited well, and it seems intended for the mid level or higher knowledge enthusiast. He’s not doing the ‘what is merlot’ genre that sneaks into Wine for Normal People every now and then.

• Levi Dalton’s IDTT is best in class in every dimension. It’s like Yquem towering over all the other peers. Totally worth going back into the history and downloading episodes of interest.

• I listen to Sarah Kemp’s ‘Wine Conversations’ periodically, and every time the cloying/cringeworthy fawning sticks out like new. It’s hard to get used to. Hard to recommend unless there is a guest one is interested in.

1. Levi is of course, in a league of his own. Industry standard.

2. I enjoy X Chateu for the business perspective at times. Not enough podcasts about this important subject.

3. I love the Bedrock Wine Conversations as it’s very conversational. And Chris lets his guests speak.

4. Inside Winemaking with Jim Duane can be good form a very technical, nerdy winemaking perspective, but the low audio quality and high noise can be challenging. Feels like everyone is 6ft from the mic and the gain is turned up the max.

5. The Wine Makers can be fun, but often suffers from bad audio as it’s not mic’ed properly. Very often you’ll hear the hosts clearly, but the guest as if he’s 15ft away. It also gets a little too chatty, jumbled and interrupted at times, when guests aren’t properly introduced or guided along with specific questions etc. I keep wanting them to follow up or delve deeper into things the guest says, but instead the hosts start chatting our telling their own anecdotes and it gets sidetracked and lost. But they can be funny and the mood is always good.

6. Where Wine Takes You. It can have some interesting guests and info, is well produced and has great audio, but is basically a disguised promotional tool for Paso Robles Wine Country and the host, Adam Montiel (who does have a great radio voice), can be a bit too breathless and fawning at times.

7. Golden West Podcast. Ryan had some great winemaking guest on his nascent podcast and had an enthusiasm for knowledge, but he seems to have stopped doing it. Now it’s just repeats each release.

As a general rule, I basically can’t stand any podcast that just uses the zoom audio. There are perfectly fine podcast softwares that record the audio at both end in high quality, so no need to use the computers shitty built-in.

This recent release from WFNP was actually pretty good.

It covers some of the lesser observed problems - lightstrike, mousiness in natural wines, smoke taint - which might be of interest even to knowledgeable consumers. Jamie Good (wineanorak blog) is credited for some of the content in this cast, so its not as opinionated as the typical episode.

Like others have said, I listen to Levi and I’ll Drink to That, fantastic podcast. I just wish the episodes came out a bit more frequently, but they are so expertly produced. Going to check out some of the other podcasts listed above! Excited for some new wine-related content lol

Plenty well deserved mentions above for IDTT but I would also recommend The Black Wine Guy Experience by MJ Towler. I really enjoyed his podcast with Thatcher Baker-Briggs and JJ Redick.

Consider this another vote for the Oregon Wine History Archive Podcast. In anticipation of an upcoming trip to Oregon, I’ve been listening to a lot of these lately. Most of them are good, but some of the interviews with the early pioneers of Oregon wine really fascinating.