Anya Myalyuk was born above the Arctic Circle, in a familywhere her father drank vodka and her mother drank Soviet champagne.

She arrived in New York at twenty-two without real English, got waiting jobs by lying on her résumé, and started reading the wine lists. A manager pointed her at Gary Vaynerchuk; then she watched SOMM and decided that same night to find out howyou become one.

What makes her different from every other accessibility creatoris what came next — she sold a premium California portfolio for one of the largest distributors in America, which means she can explain the part consumers never see: how a bottle actually lands on a restaurant list, and how much of that is relationships, placement and margin rather than what's in the glass.

This week: why she defends certifications, what burned her out of the business, the year she stopped thinking about wine, why the Santa Cruz Mountains is the most underrated region in California, and the honest thing nobody says about European wine.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

I was on a hillside in Napa, twenty minutes into geeking out about a vineyard, when my friend Chandler — whocould not care less about the Harlan family tree — started beaming. I asked her why. "I’m just excited to see YOU so excited."

That’s this whole episode. She caught the feeling, not the facts. Matt Horkey’s mentor said it better than I can: wine needs less educators and more seducers. This week I make the casethat the industry has the sequence backwards — we hand people the textbook before we’ve played them the song. There’s the woman who quit wine after one question in a tasting room, the difference between performing expertise andsharing discovery, the winemaker with eighty perfect scores who describes his wine like a car crash into a chocolate shop, and why I hire for enthusiasm over credentials. Teaching creates students. Sharing creates friends.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Doug Frost's uncle poured him a 1968 Louis Martini SpecialSelect Pinot Noir when he was fifteen — his first glass of wine ever. He told that story so often that Mike Martini eventually sent him a bottle of the same wine, which he used to ambush his aunt and uncle at dinner decades later. He has a degree in acting and directing, won his first wine contest by doing animpression of the restaurant's wine steward, and then sat the Master Sommelier and Master of Wine exams at the same time, which he says is not a good idea. He passed the theory first go and flunked the tasting. Today he's one of a handful of people alive holding both titles, buys wine for United Airlines, won an Emmy for a PBS wine show, and owns Echolands in Walla Walla. This week: what happens to aroma at altitude, why he chose Walla Walla over Napa, chillable reds nine years before they were cool, goats and sheep between the rows — and his flatrefusal to blame consumers for not buying the wine. When something doesn't sell, the trade says people need to be better educated. His answer: no, that's our fault.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.