Paul Hobbs' wine story began with a secret.

His mother didn't allow alcohol at the family dinner table. But one winter evening in 1969, his father arrived with Dixie cups filled with a mysterious yellow-orange liquid and asked the family to taste it. Paul's mother declared it the best juice she'd ever tasted.

The bottle was 1962 Château d’Yquem.

Paul was headed toward medical school, not the wine business. But his father's interest in vineyards and an influential professor at Notre Dame helped redirect him toward UC Davis. In 1977, his research into French and American oak helped land him a position at Robert Mondavi.

What followed was an extraordinary career.

In this episode of Uncorking What's Next, Jeff Zacharia talks with Paul about working with Robert Mondavi, joining the team behind the earliest vintages of Opus One, and experiencing firsthand the collision between California's questioning, experimental culture and Bordeaux's deeply established winemaking traditions.

From there, Paul's search for great vineyards took him around the world.

One of the most consequential stops was Argentina. Paul recalls questioning the accepted wisdom that Malbec was primarily useful as a blending grape. Working with Nicolás Catena and experimenting with old vineyards, different farming practices and barrels, he helped produce a Malbec that attracted the attention of the first wave of American wine press visiting Argentina in the early 1990s.

The conversation travels further, to Armenia, where Paul encountered the challenge of developing wine in a place without the modern infrastructure or trained workforce he was accustomed to, and eventually back to the Finger Lakes, bringing his career remarkably close to where his father's original wine ambitions began.

But this isn't simply a retrospective.

Paul and Jeff discuss what the wine industry needs to do differently today: how younger consumers discover wine, why traditional critics no longer control the conversation as they once did, and why the industry has to adapt its communication to a world of social media, smartphones and new voices.

Paul also reflects on how his own definition of success has changed. After decades of pursuing vineyards, countries and new challenges, he argues that the next generation should pursue what matters to them, take risks while they can, and be willing to break rules.

In this episode:

• Paul's first wine: 1962 Château d’Yquem served in a Dixie cup
• Why he nearly became a doctor instead of a winemaker
• UC Davis and joining Robert Mondavi
• What Robert Mondavi understood about building Napa Valley
• The fascinating cultural clashes behind early Opus One
• Challenging accepted thinking about Malbec in Argentina
• The risks behind some of Paul's biggest breakthroughs
• Making wine in Armenia and the impact wine can have on a community
• Returning home to the Finger Lakes
• How the next generation is changing wine communication
• Why Paul's definition of success has evolved
• His advice on taking chances and breaking rules
• Why wine, ultimately, is about connection

Connect:

Website: uncorkingwhatsnext.com

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Email: jzfinewine@gmail.com

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Carlos de Jesus of Amorim Cork joins Jeff Zacharia to explore how the cork industry fought its way back from the crisis of TCA, cork taint, and why the humble cork may matter more to wine's future than most of us realize.

For centuries, natural cork was virtually synonymous with fine wine. Then came TCA.

As cork taint damaged bottles and consumer confidence, the cork industry faced an existential challenge: could a natural product produced by the billions ever achieve the extraordinary consistency demanded by modern wineries?

Carlos de Jesus has spent more than 20 years at Amorim, the world's largest producer of natural cork, at the center of that transformation. In this conversation, he explains how Amorim combined preventative measures, new production methods and increasingly sophisticated testing to address contaminants at concentrations measured in parts per trillion.

Then the conversation moves from the winery to Portugal's cork forests. Carlos explains why harvesting cork doesn't require cutting down the tree, how cork production supports a much larger environmental and economic ecosystem, and why sustainability has become central to the case for natural cork.

In this episode:

• What TCA is and why humans can detect incredibly small amounts
• How Amorim approached the cork-taint crisis
• Quality control measured in parts per trillion
• How natural cork has changed over the past two decades
• Cork vs. screw caps
• The relationship between closures and wine aging
• Why Portugal's cork forests are environmentally significant
• Cork recycling and second-life applications
• Why an ancient product continues to evolve through modern science

Carlos also takes us into the cork forest itself, where a harvest still uses techniques with roots stretching back thousands of years.

This is an episode about far more than pulling a cork. It's about trust—and how an industry nearly lost it, then set out to earn it back.

00:00 Cold open and introduction

00:40 Carlos's background — from political science to Amorim

02:56 Why cork felt like something bigger than a job

05:35 What TCA is and what it does to wine

07:33 How Amorim combined prevention and cure to defeat cork taint

11:16 The dark years — when the market couldn't yet see the progress

13:26 The cork forest: 40 million years of native species

15:24 The 43-year timeline from planting to quality cork

18:17 Why even everyday wines benefit from cork

21:52 Cork's second life: flooring, aerospace, and the NYC recycling project

25:02 Premox and what the research actually shows about cork's role

28:48 The closure wars: where things stand in 20 years

31:33 The cultural relevance of the cork pop — and what's at stake

34:34 Early wine memory: a vertical of Château Latour

36:25 Breakout moment: Jancis Robinson's article on his birthday

38:20 Advice for anyone who feels they don't belong in wine

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Contact: jzfinewine@gmail.com

In 1981, someone had the nerve to plant Cabernet and Merlot on the Tuscan coast in a place no one thought could grow great wine. Forty years later, Ornellaia is one of the most celebrated estates on the planet. Lamberto Frescobaldi joins Jeff Zacharia to tell the whole story and to explain why the best may still be ahead.

About Lamberto Frescobaldi

Lamberto Frescobaldi is the head of the Frescobaldi family wine estates, one of Italy's most historic wine dynasties with roots in Tuscany dating to the 14th century. Under his leadership, Frescobaldi acquired and built Ornellaia into a global benchmark, alongside celebrated estates including Masseto, CastelGiocondo, and Nipozzano.

In this conversation

— How Bolgheri went from an afterthought to one of Italy's great wine regions

— The 1998 Wine Spectator Top 100 moment Lamberto calls "a rocket" for Ornellaia

— What Ornellaia actually feels like; warm, polished, Mediterranean in spirit, never asking you to dress up for it

— Why Lamberto refuses the "Super Tuscan" label, and why he's grateful Americans invented it

— Walking a vineyard and seeing not a cluster of grapes but a bottle with a label already on it

— The new generation of wine drinkers, more open, more curious, less beholden to old hierarchies

— Why people will drink less wine in the years ahead, and why that is not a bad thing

— The line Lamberto says he would put on the back of every bottle: ‘forbidden to drink alone’

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

01:35 Growing up Frescobaldi — countryside, cellars, and no pressure

05:45 An early sip through a straw and the feeling of being grown up

08:30 It all starts in the vineyard — a connection to Graeme MacDonald

11:27 How Ornellaia began: Bolgheri, Cabernet, and a radical vision

14:25 The 1985 first vintage and the road to recognition

15:24 The 1998 Wine Spectator Top 100 — the moment everything changed

16:40 How to describe Ornellaia: warmth, balance, and a wink

19:45 Super Tuscan — a label Lamberto never uses but is grateful for

25:26 How the luxury wine consumer is changing

28:26 The future of wine — opportunity, tension, and staying hungry

31:05 Bolgheri's continued potential and the challenge for new producers

34:34 The long view — investment horizons and generational thinking

35:10 Stewardship: echoes of Lafleur and Laura Catena

36:41 Authenticity: seeing a bottle hanging in the vineyard

39:03 Place matters more than ever — every bottle is a trip

40:52 Wine is not something you drink alone

42:01 Early wine memory: a straw, a bottle, and a room full of oil-sealed wine

44:06 Breakout moment: the best has yet to come

45:34 Advice for anyone who feels they don't belong in wine

Related episodes

Ep. 001 — Omri Ram, Château Lafleur

Ep. 004 — Graeme & Alex MacDonald, MacDonald Vineyards

Ep. 006 — Dr. Laura Catena, Bodega Catena Zapata

Find Uncorking What's Next

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La Tête d'Or

For nearly 300 years, Château Gruaud-Larose has occupied one of the great terroirs of Saint-Julien: nearly 200 acres in an extraordinary single, unbroken vineyard.

And yet, for a good part of its modern history, I thought of Gruaud-Larose as something of a sleeper Second Growth, a château whose wines didn't always fully reflect the potential of its remarkable terroir.

I don't believe that anymore.

My guest, Nicolas Sinoquet, CEO of Château Gruaud-Larose, has spent more than a decade helping lead the estate's resurgence. His route there was unusual: raised in Normandy outside the wine business, he was preparing to build an Armagnac business when a conversation with Jean Merlaut, Gruaud-Larose's owner and his wife's uncle, unexpectedly changed his path. Nicolas says it took him about three seconds to accept an offer from Jean..

What followed was not a reinvention of Gruaud-Larose so much as a long-term effort to unlock what was already there.

We talk about why Nicolas believes the vineyard must always come first, the decades required to transform a great vineyard, the estate's move to organic farming, and why the 2025 vintage may represent the wine he has been trying to make since arriving.

But our conversation goes well beyond winemaking.

Nicolas has some refreshingly unconventional views about Bordeaux: why château prices must remain reasonable, why the en primeur system may need to evolve, why estates may increasingly need to age wines themselves, and why Bordeaux must become less intimidating if it wants to attract the next generation of wine drinkers.

And then there is stewardship.

A bottle of 1989 Gruaud-Larose taught Nicolas something fundamental: he may work at the château for 30 years, but the wines can live far longer than any one person's tenure. His responsibility isn't to leave his mark. It's to care for something that existed long before him and will continue long after him.

It's a conversation about patience, change, and how you move a nearly 300-year-old château forward without losing what made it special in the first place.

Marc Bouffard is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is also, by any measure, one of the most respected independent voices in fine wine — built not from a role in the trade, not from a formal credential, but from pure passion, a scientist's rigor, and an Instagram account called @englishmans_claret.

In this episode, Marc and Jeff sit down to talk about how all of it happened: the 1966 Léoville Barton that opened a door to the Barton-Sartorius family; the vertical of Ducru-Beaucaillou going back to 1929 that began a lasting friendship with Bruno Borie; and why a Harvard neurologist with friends "in real life" eventually said yes to Instagram — and wrote a 368-page book.

That book is Saint-Julien: Vineyards, Cellars, People, and Place (Académie du Vin Library), the first volume in a planned series covering all of Bordeaux's major appellations. It covers all eleven classified growths of Saint-Julien, with tasting notes stretching back to 1922, and a deliberate choice to leave out numerical scores — a decision Marc says made his writing significantly better.

In this episode:

• How Marc built trust and access inside the châteaux without any formal role in the wine trade
• The "Englishman's Claret" origin story — and the Oxford tasting that first made him think, how can two wines from the same place be so different?
• Why Saint-Julien is the archetypal Bordeaux, and why its lack of a first growth may actually be a strength
• What "the long tour" means as a philosophy — and why asking why matters more than knowing what
• The case for Bordeaux's extraordinary value right now, and where the perception problem still lives
• En primeur: who it works for, who it doesn't, and what he sees changing
• Why he removed scores from the book — and why his tasting notes immediately improved when he did
• Old bottles and what they tell you that recent vintages can't: a scientist's approach to terroir
• The "looking back / looking forward" structure that makes the book a document meant to age
• Saint-Estèphe and Pauillac: the next volumes already underway

Promo: Use code UNCORKING at checkout for 15% off Saint-Julien at the Académie du Vin Library.

https://academieduvinlibrary.com/products/saint-julien-marc-bouffard

For nearly a century, Domaine Huet has been one of the defining estates of the Loire Valley and one of the world's greatest producers of Chenin Blanc. But in 2003, everything changed.

When the Huet family sold the estate, many in the wine world questioned what would happen next. Could new owners preserve one of France's most revered domaines? Would its identity survive? Would the philosophy that had made Huet legendary be lost?

In this episode of Uncorking What's Next, Jeff Zacharia sits down with Sarah Hwang, whose family stepped into that challenge more than twenty years ago.

Sarah shares the remarkable story of taking over an estate that meant far more than vineyards and buildings. Domaine Huet was—and remains—a cornerstone of the Vouvray community, shaped by the vision of Victor and Gaston Huet and decades of pioneering work, including becoming one of France's earliest biodynamic estates.

Jeff and Sarah discuss how her family approached that responsibility with humility, choosing stewardship over reinvention. They explore why Chenin Blanc may be one of the world's most misunderstood grapes, how Sec, Demi-Sec, and Moelleux express entirely different personalities, and why Huet's wines continue to age for decades with extraordinary grace.

Along the way, Sarah reflects on growing up in a family of scientists, how stories of South Africa first sparked her imagination about wine, and why wine is ultimately about curiosity, generosity, and human connection.

• The challenging transition of Domaine Huet to new ownership
• Earning the trust of the Vouvray community
• What stewardship really means at a historic wine estate
• Why Chenin Blanc deserves far more attention
• Biodynamic farming decades before it became fashionable
• The remarkable history of Domaine Huet
• Why great wine is ultimately about people, places, and memories

This is a conversation about legacy—not simply preserving the past, but earning the right to shape the future.

Scott Becker grew up on the edge of dairy farm country in Wisconsin, played football at the Air Force Academy, served in counterintelligence — including deployments overseas after 9/11 — and talked his way into Harvard Business School. When career services suggested Goldman Sachs, he said no. He was going to Napa Valley to make wine.

What he walked into at Realm Cellars in 2012 was a mess. Bad credit, borrowed facilities, a Brett-affected vintage he ultimately dumped down the drain — bottle by bottle — rather than let it define the brand. A quarter of his production, gone. Realm 2.0 was built on that decision.

In this conversation, Jeff and Scott cover the full arc: growing up in the Midwest, military service and the perspective it gave him, an unforgettable lunch with Bill Harlan and Napa's founding generation, the painful early years at Realm, the transformation from grape buyer to landowner, and one of the most consequential decisions in recent Napa history — choosing not to make a single bottle in 2020 because of smoke taint.

They also dig into what it means to build something genuinely new in Napa today: Realm's unique identity across multiple vineyards and sites, the post-cult era and what comes next, premature oxidation in Burgundy, why the greatest competitor to fine wine is non-consumption, and whether Coombsville could be the Oakville story of the next generation.

This episode includes short explainers on Brettanomyces and premature oxidation for listeners who want to go deeper.

Sponsors:

Wine Market Journal — promo code UNCORKED

La Tête d'Or

The Durand Corkscrew

Connect:

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Email: jzfinewine@gmail.com

Jermaine Stone — known to many as the Wolf of Wine — didn't grow up around fine wine. He grew up in the Bronx, the first in his family born in the United States, with a dad who was a welder and a dream of making it as a rapper. The only wine in his house was Manischewitz, poured into his mom's black cake at the holidays.

What happened next is one of the great origin stories in the wine world.

Jermaine took a shipping clerk job at Zachys in 2004 — not because he cared about wine, but because it had a desk and room to grow. Within a few years he was running logistics, then bid clerking at auction, and in 2012 he became the first Black wine auctioneer in the United States. A moment some called a Jackie Robinson moment — though Jermaine, characteristically, says he was just nervous about the pronunciation.

In this episode, Jeff and Jermaine cover the full arc: the Peninsula Hotel realization that ended his rap career, the Don Zachys kitchen conversation that kept him from leaving, the 1998 Chevalier-Montrachet that opened his ears to complexity, and how a podcast he started just to stay relevant turned into something neither of them saw coming — 110 episodes, a James Beard nomination, an Emmy nomination, guest lectures at Cornell, and the Wine & Hip Hop experience, which has now brought 150 people to Clos Vougeot and is expanding to LA, Burgundy, Champagne, and Brooklyn.

They also get into Tasting Notes from the Streets — jerk chicken with Lambrusco, champagne with chicken nuggets — and what Jermaine believes the wine world has to do better: embrace the entry points, stop gatekeeping, and ask yourself one question when you feel like you don't belong: Who told you that?

Oh — and the nickname? Jeff gave it to him. In Hong Kong. Outside a club. It's a great story.

In this episode:

• Growing up in the Bronx and landing at Zachys by accident
• Leaving rap behind at the Peninsula Hotel in LA
• Becoming the first Black wine auctioneer in the US
• The 1998 Chevalier-Montrachet that changed everything
• Building the Wine & Hip Hop podcast to 110 episodes
• Wine & Hip Hop — from a two-day harvest party at Clos Vougeot to a global series
• Tasting Notes from the Streets: why jerk chicken and Lambrusco make perfect sense
• Wine as a social equalizer — and why the industry needs more entry points
• Early wine memory, breakout moment, and advice for anyone who feels they don't belong

Connect with Jermaine Stone:

Wine & Hip Hop Podcast | Tasting Notes from the Streets | Wine Bars, Volume One

https://wineandhiphop.com/

Sponsors:

🍽️ La Tete D'Or — Chef Daniel Boulud's French American steakhouse, Manhattan Flatiron District 📊 https://www.latetedorbydaniel.com

Wine Market Journal — Real auction transaction data for fine wine buyers and collectors. Use code UNCORKING for 10% off your first annual subscription: wmarketjournal.com 🍾https://www.winemarketjournal.com/

The Durand Corkscrew — Share your story of falling in love with wine for a chance to win one. https://thedurand.com/

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