The best podcasts for learning about food, beer and wine, music, and language.

We are a PNW-based podcasting husband and wife team with a weekly podcast called The Wine Pair Podcast. The focus of our podcast is to help people learn about and discover reasonably priced wines - meaning under $20 - that are relatively easy to find at a local or online store. Our basic format is to focus on a specific varietal or type of wine, give some background and history on it, and then taste and review three wines and talk about what food would pair with the wine. We aim to make it fun, funny, relatable, easy to understand, and interesting to both the wine novice and those more experienced with wine. We also periodically do episodes where we interview winemakers from all over the world. We are proud to say that our podcast was recommended by the editors of Decanter Magazine in their October 2022 issue, and they described us this way: “This entertaining US podcast by Seattle-based husband-and-wife team Joe and Carmela is a fun, irreverent, and chatty introduction to wine, with lots of wine basics, food pairing tips and explainers on varieties and styles. Launched in October 2021, previous episodes include: ‘WTF is Pinot Blanc?’, ‘Pairing wine with barbecue’ and ‘wines to drink at an Indian restaurant’. Listen on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.” We have been life-long lovers of wine, and have been lucky enough to be exposed to some of the best wines through family and friends. We also love to travel, and we know that in many places around the world, culture is often understood through cuisine, and wines are part of the experience of the food and people. We wanted to turn that passion and experience with wine into something that was fun and educational - something that we would find interesting.

As we mentioned above, our podcast is about wine - learning about wine and exposing ourselves and our listeners to new wines. Most people are familiar with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir, but did you know that in Italy alone there are over 350 different wine varieties? And, wine can seem to be a pretty snobby and expensive hobby, so we wanted to break through that by focusing on every day wines, wines under $20 that are reasonably easy to find, and talk about them - their tastes, smells, and food they would pair with - in words that normal people use.

Carmela and I are former teachers, and so we love to learn about stuff! That is very much why we started The Wine Pair Podcast in the first place. Carmela is also a baker, running her own home baking business, so of of course we needed to include some food inspiration! Our list includes some podcasts that we think are great for people who love to learn about a variety of subjects, all of which we have some love for as well - things related to food, beer and wine, language, and music. All of these podcasts are authentic, interesting, and fun. We really wanted to focus on podcasts where you can hear the sweat and effort the hosts put into their content.