The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Maryse Chevriere a five-question, multiple-choice wine quiz, and her answers double as a myth-busting crash course.

Why do sommeliers have you taste before pouring the full glass? To check whether the wine is corked or flawed — and, honestly, to catch whether you simply don't like it. Maryse would rather figure that out early, pour the bottle by the glass, and steer you toward something you'll love than watch you pay for a bottle you'll never finish. And that returned bottle needn't go to waste: if it isn't faulty, let the staff taste it so they can sell it by the glass as a special. Everybody wins.

"Good legs"? It's about sugar and alcohol content — not quality, not price, and definitely not a Boston Marathon qualifying time. Maryse calls it a phrase you don't really need anymore, though it opens a lovely tangent about her dad, an old-school wine lover whose family hailed from Bordeaux and who was sure those were simply the best wines there were. As she learned the subject herself, she realized his confidence came from a narrow lens — but he enjoyed wine and had a good time, and sometimes that's its own kind of bliss.

Why swirl? To release the aromas — the contact with air wakes the wine up. She half-loves Forrest's alternate theory that you're summoning the flavor gods. On tasting technique, she suggests drawing in a little air like sipping through a mini cocktail straw (no gargling required) and letting the wine touch all points of your palate, since you taste different things in different places — without getting too fancy about it.

And sniffing the cork? Mostly theater. A cork smells like cork. If you want to know whether a wine is tainted, smell the wine in the glass, not the stopper — a lesson she picked up early in her training.

For the Wine-Curious listener, it's five minutes of permission to stop being intimidated by the rituals — and to understand what's worth doing and what's just for show.

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Sandwiches and cold milk. That's what greeted a five-year-old Gino Santos when the U.S. Coast Guard pulled his family off a sinking shrimp boat and brought them ashore in Key West. For a kid who had just spent the crossing crammed into a shrimp hold with his grandmother, it was heaven. That same resilience and hunger would define Gino's path decades later when he and his brother Henry built Premium Blend Cocktails from nothing. In this episode, Gino walks Forrest through:

The harrowing details of the family's escape from Cuba — a stolen shrimp boat, Soviet-era communism, a Bay of Pigs connection, and a Coast Guard rescue

His academic path through Stetson University and an MBA from the University of Miami

How a sales job with Oscar Mayer led him to discover a wine-based spirit product that nobody was marketing correctly

The origin of the Premium Blend partnership with his brother Henry, who was running a Colombian mining equipment company in Miami at the time

The critical role of Florida Distillers and a mentor named Chris Mitchell, who took a chance on two unknown entrepreneurs with no industry experience

Why education was Premium Blend's biggest early challenge — and how "getting the liquid to the lips" at trade shows and samplings changed everything

The wine-based cocktail space has exploded since the 90s, and Premium Blend was there at the beginning — grinding through skepticism one margarita at a time.

Learn more at premiumblend.com

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The best way to learn wine, Maryse Chevriere argues, isn't to read about it — it's to pour two glasses and taste the difference. In this episode she walks Forrest through the drinking games tucked into How to Sound Wine Smart, designed to make abstract concepts click through direct comparison. Think a wine you assumed was sweet suddenly revealing itself as dry when set beside an actually sweet one, a shy grape next to an aromatic Gewürztraminer, or one bottle tasted at first sip, again at thirty minutes, and again at two hours to feel what time and air really do. There are no winners, no losers, and no test — just an experience built to make the lesson stick and get people genuinely excited to drink wine.

Maryse also pulls back the curtain on making the book. Illustrating it took five or six months — most of them while she was pregnant — and proved trickier than expected. On Instagram, funny tasting notes hand her ready-made visual ideas; for the book she deliberately chose the generic, professional terms people actually use, which meant figuring out how to paint something as abstract as "rustic," "silky," or "leathery." Writing was its own slow burn, since she's a self-described fiddler who can't move on until a line sounds exactly right.

Asked for her home run, she points to the "character" chapter. Instead of the technical checklist of fruits, non-fruits, and "medium-plus" this-and-that she was trained in, she gives readers something more relatable: a wine that's friendly, that's giving golden retriever energy. It's a warmer, more human way in.

Forrest names the throughline — she's not dumbing wine down, she's making something genuinely complex feel approachable. This isn't soda off an assembly line; it's the product of an enormous amount of craft, and she wants more people to feel welcome to it. Maryse agrees, wondering aloud why wine intimidates people in a way that describing a restaurant dish or a piece of art simply doesn't. The stigma, she says, is what wine has had to work hardest to overcome — and helping people get past it is the whole point.

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Ever wonder why your favorite neighborhood restaurant doesn't serve cocktails? Chances are it comes down to one thing: the liquor license. In many states, a full liquor license can run well into six or seven figures on the open market — making it virtually impossible for small and mid-sized venues to offer a full bar program.

That's exactly the problem Gino Santos and his brother Henry set out to solve with Premium Blend Cocktails. Their wine-based spirits are legally classified as wine — meaning any venue with a basic beer and wine license (which in Florida costs around $400) can serve them. The result? Cocktail-style drinks, no liquor license required.

In this episode, Gino explains:

Why liquor licenses are so expensive and hard to obtain

How Premium Blend products are formulated to qualify legally as wine

The difference between a liquor license and a beer-and-wine license — and why it matters for thousands of venues

How his family escaped Cuba thanks to an uncle who literally stole a boat

Growing up bilingual in Newark and Miami with a famous Cuban singer-songwriter father

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Some people are trained into wine. Maryse Chevriere talked her way in on pure enthusiasm — and it turned out to be the perfect qualification. In this episode she tells Forrest Kelly how a manager went to bat for her despite her being "green," echoing the philosophy her chef husband lives by: give him someone hungry to learn over someone he'd have to un-train.

From there, Maryse walks through the pivot that shaped her path — leaving New York not because she'd outgrown the wine bar, but because she was ready for a new experience and drawn to the easy access to wine country that San Francisco offered. She admits she wasn't overthinking the cross-country move in her late 20s, which she figures is exactly the right way to make big decisions: try it, and change course if it doesn't work.

The conversation lingers on a standout wine-country memory — a Napa producer pouring an unexpectedly aromatic Grignolino, a grape you rarely see, that felt gloriously out of type for the region — though her heart belongs to cooler-climate Sonoma Pinot.

Then Forrest turns to the main event: How to Sound Wine Smart. Maryse explains how her Instagram account revealed that wine's real barrier isn't the wine — it's the language. People freeze at the shop or restaurant, unsure what they're being sold, and just nod along. Most wine books bury terminology in a tiny glossary at the back; she wanted to flip that, building a fun, visual, genuinely useful resource that reads like a friend talking over a glass rather than a textbook. Forrest praises the book's approachable breakdowns — like how to actually taste a glass of wine — and Maryse sums up her whole mission in a sentence: make it easy to digest, and make it sound human.

For the Wine-Curious listener, this one's a permission slip: you don't need to be trained, and you don't need to fake it. You just need the right words.

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