The best podcasts for Wine and Spirits

Hi! I'm Val Caruso, a Certified Wine Educator (CWE), lifelong learner, and shameless cork dork. I spent 25 years in the US Air Force, serving both in the enlisted and officer corps, and loved nearly every minute of it. My life and expertise was built in communications, command and control, intelligence and reconnaissance systems, project management, and culminating as a combat operations planner. It was exciting, fulfilling, and I knew nothing would ever top my last job. So I retired and went to wine school. It was supposed to be for a year, but I knew when I landed in Italy 90 days after my retirement that I wouldn't look back. It turns out that something would top it. but in a whole new delicious way. My interest in wine originated 23 years ago when I was stationed in Northern California. My friends and I would rent a driver and a van and set off for Napa Valley every couple of months or so. Immediately I was drawn to whatever a particular winery was doing that nobody else was. A decade later, having spent the first year of my "new life" in Italy studying wine at an international hospitality school, I knew there was more I wanted to learn, see, taste, and - most importantly - feel. I was hooked on all that the world of wine had to offer: history, geology, geography, science, tradition, stories, and all that wine offers us in a glass. This led me to a month in France at a culinary institute studying only French wine. Since then I've been immersed in wine studies, and I knew I'd never go back to the career I truly once loved and lived for. Now I "live the wine" (to quote my first Italian wine teacher, Massimo). I provide bespoke wine "edutainment" events and tastings for public and private clients, have served six years on the Society of Wine Educators's Board of Directors, and have enjoyed taking many exams along the way to collect an alphabet soup of post nominals. I'm particularly proud of my diploma from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET), but I'm the geek that enjoyed studying for and taking ALL the exams.

Glass in Session® is not just another wine podcast. I've hosted other wine podcasts that featured interviews, which were a blast, and have been over the moon to have interviewed many of my "wine heroes." This podcast, launched in 2019, is my passion project, because I talk about what I love about wine the most. There are so many fun and funny aspects of wine and spirits. I look to bring my listeners not only useful booze knowledge to enhance their imbibing arsenal, but I can't help but dig up perspectives ranging from the interesting to the absurd. Riots and rebellions? We got that. Pirates? Barbarians? Check and check. OK, there are some bad jokes, but I can't help myself. In selecting these wine and spirits shows for my playlist, I'm offering in-depth, interesting, and unusual approaches to the wine and/or spirits conversations. Sometimes it's the subject, sometimes it's the interview, but the one thing all of these hosts have in common is an unimpeachable knowledge of the subject.

Of COURSE my playlist is about booze! Most are wine, but I can't stress enough how the whisky podcast has affected my own bar stash at home. All of these podcasts are loaded with knowledge, are easy to listen to and enjoyable, are well produced in terms of audio quality, and, in their own way, have expanded my own drinking and thinking when it comes to wine and spirits. I hope everyone will enjoy at least one of these, as I understand different flavors of podcasts appeal to different podcast consumers. They are in no particular order. All that said, I'll raise my glass right now to ALL the wine and spirits podcasters out there in the community, and the drinkers who love them! So many of them deserve a spot in your feed. Cheers ~