The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Justin breaks down what's actually in the glass — Pastorale Pinot Noir is fruit-forward and flashy with red cherry and strawberry notes and a long finish, while Quarter Moon, sitting closer to the ocean and the Petaluma Gap, leans Old World: spicier, darker, with bigger tannins and more structure. Thicker skins and smaller clusters mean a higher skin-to-juice ratio in the fermenter, and deeper color in the bottle. Same farming, same winemaking — the site does the talking.

On Chardonnay, Justin makes what he calls "varietally correct" Chardonnay: high-acid, fruit-driven, fermented in large-format oak so the wood supports the wine without smothering it. No butter bombs here.

Then Forrest asks the hard question: is there anything positive to take away from a decade of California wildfires? Justin is candid — nothing positive except the lessons. He recounts the 2017 Tubbs fire that shattered his sense of the industry's invincibility, and the 2020 LNU Lightning Complex fires that forced Freestone to abandon its entire harvest. Grapes breathe, smoke binds into the berry, and those burnt flavors can't be removed — so rather than compromise quality standards, they walked away from the vintage. And he throws no shade at winemakers who made a different call to keep their businesses afloat.

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She had good reason to be distracted. Sara arrives listing off everything new in her life — a new album, a new baby, a new house, a new tour, and a new shirt, the last of which turns out to be the only one she's willing to discuss at length. There's a running joke about her age that she refuses to concede, a stretch where she takes over the broadcast entirely to plug her own record, and a genuinely strange detour into reading the temperature, the humidity, and the dew point off the studio screen, at which point she asks the question every radio person has privately wondered about their own weather reports.

Forrest had interviewed her once before, a few years earlier, right around the time "Born to Fly" was arriving, and he spends this visit cheerfully collecting on that debt. Sara notices immediately. The result is two people trying to get a straight answer out of each other and failing on purpose, which is exactly what makes twenty-year-old vault tape worth keeping. This is Part 1.

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Most people who launch a non-alcoholic wine brand come at it from the wellness world, the beverage startup world, or the "I gave up drinking and couldn't find anything good" world. Anto Li Brizzi came at it from none of those places.

He came at it from the winery floor. As head of North America for an Italian capital equipment company, Anto spent years selling the machinery that wineries use to make wine. He understood the production process, the industry dynamics, and the category from the inside out. When he saw the opportunity to build a better non-alcoholic sparkling wine — one that starts as real wine and is gently dealcoholized rather than constructed from juice, sugar, and flavoring — he had the knowledge and the credibility to do it right.

In this first episode, Forrest traces Anto's full origin story:

Growing up in Sicily in a family defined by bread, bakeries, and the rhythms of Italian outdoor life

Studying aerospace engineering — bachelor's and master's degrees — before pivoting to the corporate world

A career path that took him from Fiat to agriculture to Tetra Pak and eventually to a front-row seat in the wine industry

The move to the US eleven years ago, becoming an American citizen, and making Dallas home while still traveling back to Italy multiple times a year

And the founding insight behind CLINQ ZERO: real sparkling wine, gently dealcoholized — not grape juice with bubbles, not a drink rebuilt with additives, but something that starts exactly where great wine starts.

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Justin Ennis explains that you can't talk about Napa Valley's red table wine history without talking about Joe Phelps, who founded Joseph Phelps Vineyards in 1973 after building a national construction company, Hensel Phelps, with his father's business out of Greeley, Colorado. Phelps released the first vintage of Insignia in 1974, Napa's first Bordeaux-style blend, and was also among the first to varietally label Syrah in California after Prohibition. Working alongside his first winemaker, German immigrant Walter Shug, Phelps experimented widely across varietals including Riesling, Johannesburg Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Syrah, tearing out plantings that didn't meet his standard and starting over until he found the quality he wanted. Justin connects this same relentless pursuit of excellence to the founding of Freestone Vineyards, born from Phelps' love of Burgundy wines and his desire to make a true Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in a cooler climate. That search led the Phelps team to the West Sonoma Coast, where they planted two estate vineyards, Pastoral at 60 acres and Quarter Moon at 40, totaling 100 acres roughly seven to eight miles from Bodega Bay and the Pacific Ocean, complete with a separate winemaking facility and staff dedicated entirely to the Freestone project.

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Rusty Cellars is back behind the quiz desk, and this time the subject is the one guest who literally wrote the book on wine talk. Maryse Chevriere — certified sommelier, illustrator, and James Beard Award winner for the gloriously funny @FreshCutGardenHose — gets the full Pop the Quiz treatment as Rusty turns her interview series into two rounds of trivia and translation.

Round one tests how closely you listened: her grape-stomping fall in Alsace, the humor award she won as an illustrator among writers, the Ian Cauble "fresh cut garden hose" line that named her brand, learning to drive at fifteen in Houston, and the all-Riesling wine list that gave her a big break in New York. Round two flips the glass and quizzes the language itself, busting the cork-sniffing ritual, decoding what legs really reveal, defending screw caps, and translating what "approachable" actually means when a sommelier says it with a smile.

It's the perfect capper to the Maryse series and a 5-minute crash course in sounding wine smart without a single ounce of snobbery. Tally your score, grab the book, and pour something friendly.

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