This week: Hillary Cole — former Air Force intelligence officer and author of Vineyards of War — on what wine and warfare have always had in common.Hilary spent ten years in intelligence (a Russian linguist reassigned to counterterrorism on 9/11) before a glass of Barolo rerouted her life into wine. Now a French wine scholar living in Albania, she joins Jon to talk about reading a wine the way she once read a battlespace: why Champagne became the drink of celebration in a region leveled by war every century, theKosovo full-circle moment that bookended her two careers, and why she teaches beginners structure and history instead of tasting notes — because “tasting notes can’t give youhumanity.”

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

This week: Kelli White — wine writer, decade-long sommelier, and director of education at Meadowood — on Napa as a conversion engine and why the way we talk about wine keepsturning newcomers away.

Kelli went from a Howard Hughes Fellowship in neurogenetics to writing two of the most talkedabout wine books of the last decade: Napa Valley Then & Now, the encyclopedic history, andWine Confident, which argues there’s no wrong way to enjoy wine. She and Jon talk about what living among the growers taught her (wine is agriculture, full stop), why tasting-note “winespeak” makes people feel like they’re failing a test, and why a first trip to wine country might be the best thing that ever happens to a curious drinker.

New episodes Tuesday mornings.

Jon walked into a BMW dealership and put a deposit down on a car that hadn't arrived yet. He didn't need the salesperson to explain anything — the brand had spent decades showing him the ladder. Then he walked into his local Publix wine aisle and watched the whole system fall apart.

Five hundred bottles. Five hundred unrelated labels. What no consumer can see is that many of those bottles are owned by the same companies — and that a ladder exists. Constellation owns Josh, Robert Mondavi, The Prisoner, and Schrader. Gallo owns Barefoot, Apothic, William Hill, and Orin Swift. Thearchitecture is already built. The industry just refuses to make it visible.

Jon calls it the Josh Problem. In this essay, he walks through howMercedes, Rolex, and Tudor get this right; how LVMH actually does it in wine with Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon; how Coca-Cola makes its portfolio legible under the exact same distribution constraints wine claims it can't overcome;who pays the price when the ladder stays hidden; and why the work of building it now falls to wine bars, retailers, sommeliers, and the people building places like Preface Wine.

"Wine hides the ladders. And then we wonder why people feel lost. The ladders exist. Someone just needs to turn on the lights."

Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, opening Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

Georgia Panagopoulou was a chemical engineer. Then she walked away from a "safe corporate job" in the middle of Greece's financial crisis, moved to Santorini, and enrolled in a Master's program that took her to 30 wine countries in 18 months. She documented the whole thing on Instagram — andaccidentally became one of the most followed wine voices in Europe.

Today she runs Wine Gini, a digital marketing agency that helps wineries across 25+ countries tell their stories online. She's 10 years deep in the digital wine world, and she's blunt about what the industry keeps getting wrong.

In this conversation, Georgia and Jon get into why every wine account online used to be "just pictures of bottles," why wineries say they want to be authentic and then reject the content that actually is, the difference between treating wine as the topic versus the glue, her CSV framework (Consistency, Storytelling, Value), what Greece is teaching the traditional wine world — and her free consulting for Jon as he opens Preface Wine: show the backstage, document the chef-vs-sommelier argument, and stop reciting cherry-and-strawberry tasting notes nobody cares about.

Guest: Georgia Panagopoulou (@wine.gini) — Founder, Wine Gini | Digital WineMarketer & Creator | Athens, Greece

Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine barowner, opening Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

My grandfather went from kerosene to AOL. One life. That kind of speed creates a craving for something slower — something that anchors you to a specific time and place. Wine might be the most powerful nostalgia machine ever invented, because every bottle carries something almost nothing else does: a year. In this solo episode, I explore why that year matters, how wine bridges generations at a dinner table, and why a bottle of 2019 will still taste like 2019 long after we've forgotten what that year felt like. In a world moving at the speed of light, wine moves at the speed of seasons. That's not quaint. That's essential.

The wine industry has a generational problem — and almost nothing it believes about it is true.

Pauline Vicard runs ARENI Global, the leading international think tank on the future of fine wine. Her team studied how young people in six cities — Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai — actually get into fine wine. They started with six hypotheses. Only one held up.

In this conversation, Pauline and Jon get into what the research actually says: why parents don't pass wine down (friends do), why women enter at equal rates and then disappear in their 30s, why the "$18 glass" problem is quietly killing wine's consumer base, why Succession and White Lotus have done more damage to fine wine than any health study, and why the industry's bottle-selling business model may be reaching its expiration date.

Plus — Pauline's free consulting for Jon as he opens Preface Wine: how to curate a room, why young people don't go out for wine (they go out for each other), and how to "monetize friendship" without making it feel transactional.

Guest: Pauline Vicard — Co-Founder & Executive Director, ARENI Global (https://areni.global)

Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned wine bar owner, opening Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.

Eric LeVine found wine "hopelessly intimidating" — until a 1999bike trip through Tuscany changed everything. A few years later, he built CellarTracker during a Microsoft sabbatical. It's now the world's largest wine community: 13+ million tasting notes, 175 million bottles tracked, nearly a million users.

We talk about what two decades of community data reveal about how people actually engage with wine, why he avoided gamification, and what the industry gets wrong about welcoming newcomers.

Guest: Eric LeVine — Founder & CEO, CellarTracker

WineWithJon — new episodes every Tuesday.

Connect: @winewithjon | jon@winewithjon.com

What does a $25,000 bottle of Burgundy have to do with the $14 Pinot Noir at Trader Joe's?

More than you'd think.

Most people assume the fine wine world is a parallel universe for rich people — disconnected from the wine the rest of us actually drink. In this essay, Jon makes the opposite case: the top of the wine world is the reason the rest of it works.

Using the Ferrari-and-Toyota analogy — the kid with the Ferrari poster on his wall who grows up to drive a Civic but still cares about cars — Jon argues that aspiration builds categories. Champagne's mythology fuels its mass market.Bordeaux's classified growths made Napa possible. Burgundy's prestige launched Oregon's 700+ wineries. Remove the top of the pyramid, and the bottom doesn't get stronger — it gets flatter.

"Fine wine and everyday wine aren't two separate worlds. They're the same world at different altitudes. The mountain is the reason the valley has a view at all."

Host: Jon Frutkin (@winewithjon) — lawyer turned collector turned contentcreator, opening Preface Wine in Delray Beach, FL.