This Year We're Gonna Podcast Like It's Twen-ty Twen-ty Five!
Get ready for Season 2 of Wine and Entertainment, plus TWO new podcasts - one wine-themed, one entertainment-themed - and a brand new multi-writer wine conversation endeavor.
Welcome to the first 2025 post from Wine and…and boy howdy do we have a lot of stuff to tell you about!
First and foremost, yes, we will be bringing back our flagship Wine and Entertainment podcast for Season 2, with more wine and…movie, tv, book, comic, and music pairings throughout the year. Expect a lot of Substack guests in 2025 as we cement this platform as our headquarters and share our love of both wine and entertainment with Substackers from both of these worlds.
And there are a slew of new offerings also in the works, including:
The Great American Wine Series (Podcast)
We’re putting together our first narrative podcast! And a purely wine-themed one!
I’ve been fascinated with emerging and re-emerging wine regions. In all honesty, quite a bit moreso than wine regions long-established on the world stage. And as an American, I’m extra-specially fascinated that ALL 50 STATES NOW MAKE WINE.
So this is the first of many multi-part narrative episodes to come, covering different wine regions within the U.S., but baby steps. We’re starting with perhaps the least expected of them all: ALASKA.
There are people currently working to grow wine grapes in this near-arctic environment, and recently had a game-changing breakthrough. Alaska also makes a number of unique fruit and berry wines, and many are blended with wine-wine from grapes grown in California.
We’re putting together a round of interviews to cover all the major players currently operating in the Alaskan wine scene, and even some that helped set the stage. We’ll be assembling a narrative podcast telling the story of wine in Alaska, with clips from these interviews and then we’ll wrap with a major Alaskan wine tasting report!
Free subscribers will gain access to the finsihed narrative podcast, and paid subscribers will additionally gain access to the full recorded interviews, and not just cherry-picked moments.
Alaska is just the start for this ongoing podcast series. The follow-up will likely be the Los Angeles wine scene, becaue heck, we live here, and LA is, in fact, the original hub of all winemaking in California pre-prohibition. What that history is, it’s legacy, and how winemakers are staging an LA wine-making comeback will all be covered (with tasting reports, of course.)
Anywhere But the Beginning (Podcast)
Our first pure Entertainment-themed podcast! This one will get it’s own, separate Substack, as it has nothing to do with wine.
Here’s the pitch:
In the modern era, we’re all obsessed with consuming everything, everywhere, all at once. We binge watch whole seasons or even series; we work our way through remastered director ouvres; we read through book series tht run dozens of novels, listen to artist discographies front to back, blitz through entire runs of comics consisting of dozens if not hundreds of issues.
And yet…
Once upon a time, when Network TV ruled the roost and even during the early days of Cable, we simply turned on the telly and started watching whatever was on. If it was a movie, we might be starting it 20 minutes in, or 50 minutes in, or even more. If it was a show, whatever episode was playing was what you watched. You generally had no idea where in the season or series you even were!
Comics were on spinner racks at the convenience store. You picked up whatever was there that day: Amazing Spider-Man #232? Batman #355? West Coast Avengers #20? Welp, that’s what you were reading. God knows if you’d ever stumble across the previous issues or even the next one.
Books used to be serialized in weekly or monthly periodicals. Music was whatever was on the radio or still in stock at Sam Goody.
And we fell in love with all of those things via this method. By starting “Anywhere But the Beginning.”
We want to bring back and celebrate this old-school way of consumption, by breaking all the modern day “rules” - we’re going to start movies halfway through, watch the series finale of LOST having never seen any other episode, read random chapters at random points in novels, grab whatever comic is currently on the racks regardless of not having kept up with the character, listen to a late-career album from a musician we’ve never lisented to, watch a film franchise in reverse order, you get the idea.
We’re going to share with you how much we loved doing such a thing or perhps we just felt lost/confused. What worked with the approach and what didn’t? And did doing so make us want more or less of the work and/or creator?
We’re gonna party like it’s 19-SEVENTY-9! And we hope you join us. :D
Introducing: Wine Conversations
This is going to be a monthly-ish new feature involving many - and eventually maybe even all - the wine writers on Substack. But much as with our Great American Wine Series, baby steps.
We’re currently pulling together our first half-dozen contributors, where we’ll pick a topic in the wine world, one of us will then kick off the conversation with our own post on the subject, then the others will follow suit one at a time, each adding their own thoughts and repsonsing to what was written before them, on their own Substacks. We’ll all be active in each other’s comment threads as well, until every participant has posted their one article on the topic.
Then we’ll start with a new topic, with a new initial poster and order of repsonses. The only rule being: these posts must be free for all to read and comment on.
Contributors will be free to take part or bow out as their schedules demand. But we hope to make use of this platform as a hub of so many wine writers from so many places and so many different backgrounds, generations, and parts of the industry to explore more deeply and thoroughly what the overall thinking is on major topics that face the industry today.
Look for the first Conversation to begin next week, if all goes to plan!
Premium and Ultra-Premium De-Alcoholized Wine Tasting
One last thing that’s in the works, is a massive ol’ tasting of non-alcoholic wines, but unlike many others that have done the same, we’re focusing solely on:
De-alcoholized Wine aka “Non-Alcoholic Wine” - so no “Non-Alcoholic Wine Alternatives.” (Some of those are great, but they can essentially be anything, random beverages that just have that name slapped on them, and that isn’t what we’re interested in testing.)
Premium and especially Ultra-Premium De-alcoholized Wine - I know those terms don’t come with legal definitions, but I wanted to stick to brands / winemakers that are owning those labels, and slapping on price points that demand their non-alc wine really delivers! We want to know how far de-alcoholized wine has come, and to know that, we have to try the tippity top.
We’ll be doing a few sparkling, a few whites and roses, but we’re going to focus on REDS. Because, again, if you want to know how far we’ve come, you gotta try the stuff that demands the most.
Woohoo, looking forward to it! 🍷
Wow! Some exciting things are happening over here! Can’t wait to tune in to everything.