Restaurant pricing gets a reality check, framed in familiar VinePair banter.
VinePair treats a casual wine conversation as a useful look at restaurant pricing, margin assumptions, and the limits of fixed business ratios.

Drinks culture, argued from the inside.
VinePair Podcast turns recent bottles, bar visits, restaurant rituals, and industry stories into sharp conversation about how drinking culture actually works. The mood is loose and funny, but the talk keeps returning to business realities, wine marketing, hospitality math, and what makes a trend feel real.
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VinePair Podcast is a drinks-industry roundtable with the looseness of an after-service conversation and the specificity of people who spend their lives around bottles, bars, restaurants, and trade news. It rarely begins with a tidy thesis. A bottle opened with pizza, a high-end cellar story, a conference tasting, a steakhouse perk, or a reader response becomes the path into the week’s argument. That shape gives the show its texture. It is about wine, beer, and spirits, but also about the business systems and social performances around them. The panel can talk about a rare Red Hook Rye bottle as both a collector object and a cultural signal. It can move from Washington wines to restaurant revenue ratios without losing the practical stakes. It can be funny about Martini Madness, then serious about why beverage journalism and reporting still matter. The conversation is brisk. People interrupt, tease, correct, and build on each other’s points, which keeps the show from sounding like a polished explainer. The expertise is still real. Episodes reference wine regions, whiskey releases, restaurant markup assumptions, celebrity brand deals, wine lockers, old prestige tastings, and the complicated paths people take into wine work. The show is particularly skeptical of borrowed glamour. Celebrity endorsements, Judgment of Paris nostalgia, and generic business rules all get pressed for evidence. When guests appear, the format can become more structured and reported, especially around beverage-business shifts. Most episodes still keep the panel’s familiar energy. The result is a show for listeners who want drinks coverage that is social, argumentative, and commercially literate. It understands that taste is never just taste. It is also money, memory, access, status, habit, and marketing. VinePair Podcast is strongest when it lets those forces collide in real time.
Made for: For wine, spirits, restaurant, and hospitality listeners who enjoy insider conversation more than basic tutorials. It especially fits people who follow beverage trends, brand behavior, and the business behind what gets poured.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its mix of trade fluency and casual panel friction. It turns real drinking experiences and industry articles into debates about status, pricing, marketing, and authenticity.
Join VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter, executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, and sommelier and wine educator Zach Geballe as they discuss the latest news, trends, and happenings in the world of wine, beer, and spirits each week. Now officially New York Times recommended! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
VinePair Podcast makes beverage economics accessible by connecting taste and culture to pricing, restaurant operations, technology, and brand strategy.
VinePair Podcast treats drinks as a business shaped by pricing, consumer behavior, labor costs, technology, and cultural status. Adam Teeter, Joanna Sciarrino, and Zach Geballe work through those forces conversationally, testing received wisdom against what restaurants, wine…
The AI wine picker has your order; Adam, Joanna, and Zach still have questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Restaurant pricing gets a reality check, framed in familiar VinePair banter.
VinePair treats a casual wine conversation as a useful look at restaurant pricing, margin assumptions, and the limits of fixed business ratios.
A sharp discussion of stunt ingredients, celebrity deals, and why paid authenticity rarely lands.
VinePair leans on Liz Preventer’s stunt-ingredients discussion to ask a larger question: whether the tactic has already jumped the shark. It works best when it tracks the link between celebrity endorsements, wellness-brand pairings, and the difference between genuine affinity…
A lively discussion of when a wine victory becomes a brand asset that outlasts the bottle.
The VinePair Podcast treats the Judgment of Paris less as a fixed wine-history milestone than as an ongoing test of what an old victory can still do for a brand.
A clear, practical look at AI as a shortcut for ordering wine, with the human cost still in view.
Wine recommendations usually rely on a guest being ready to describe what they like to a sommelier. This VinePair episode looks at what changes when AI steps into that moment, first touching on Gen Z drinkers and the role alcohol can play around turning 21.
A sharp look at why Irish whiskey has struggled to become an American aspiration.
Irish whiskey gets treated here as a category Americans recognize more readily than they aspire to collect. The VinePair podcast sets up that gap through the contrast between Irish whiskey's roughly 30 submissions and bourbon's about 200, then moves into Jameson's dominance, the…
A seating complaint opens onto the labor math quietly shaping a restaurant's dining room.
Restaurant seating turns into a small lesson in dining-room economics, beginning with steakhouse status markers like wine lockers at the Capitol Grill and engraved knives at Seattle's Metropolitan Grill, then moving toward the table a diner expected but did not get.
A family tequila legacy shaped by patient agave cultivation and calibrated oak.
Tequila El Mexicano comes through as a story of continuity, place, and tequila identity. Leon Banuelos Jr., a third-generation producer in the highlands of Jalisco, frames the family legacy through Arandas and a new distillery built from scratch.

Startup news with the business logic intact.

Hard tech leadership, without the mythology.

Stephen Dubner tests bourbon economics, Alzheimer's research, and money advice against hard data.

Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.

Galloway rotates Office Hours Q&A, Raging Moderates politics, and China Decode geopolitics weekly.

VinePair hosts Joanna Sciarrino and Zach Geballe discuss a Substack piece by Robert Simonson about ageism in restaurant seating.
Zach Jabal interviews Leon Banuelos Jr., third-generation tequila maker and founder of Tequila El Mexicano.
The VinePod hosts discuss their annual year-in-review episode focusing on the highs and lows of 2025 in the drinks industry, starting with tariffs as a key topic.
This episode features an interview with Joshua Boissi, co-founder of Maison Premier, exploring how the bar brought New Orleans-inspired ambiance and world-class cocktails to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The hosts discuss a personal anecdote about encountering an extremely expensive bottle of Red Hook Rye whiskey in a wealthy collector's collection, comparing it to rare wines.
The hosts discuss listener feedback on wine marketing and career transitions in the wine industry, while teasing a deeper conversation about whether Brown-Forman might be for sale.
The hosts discuss the prestige and cultural significance of wine lockers and customized steak knives at high-end steakhouses, using examples like the Capitol Grill and Metropolitan Grill.
The VinePair podcast hosts discuss recent wine experiences, including a Cabernet Franc from Friuli, while exploring themes in wine marketing and industry insights.
The VinePair podcast hosts introduce guest Dave Infante and discuss their ongoing Martini Madness bracket competition.
Zach starts with Taste Washington, then the wine-event chatter slides into a tougher question: do restaurant revenue ratios still work?
Joanna is back, and the panel opens with the kind of teasing that makes the room feel familiar.
Adam Teeter and Zach Jabal open the VinePair Podcast without Joanna, who is on vacation, after a guest cancels because he is traveling.
The hosts start with a look at Gen Z drinking around the 21st birthday.
Aaron Goldfarb joins Adam Teeter, Joanna Sherino, and Zach Jabal on the VinePair Podcast to unpack why Irish whiskey still revolves around Jameson, using VinePair's 14-bottle Irish-whiskey list as the trigger.
The hosts discuss whether hospitality and etiquette in the trade have declined, while casually chatting about January's challenges and upcoming events like Super Bowl parties.
The hosts discuss changes in alcohol dietary guidelines while promoting the Charleston Wine and Food Festival and sharing personal drinking experiences.
This episode features an interview with Josh Taylor, co-founder and CEO of TabX, discussing how his app allows users to open and close bar tabs from their phones to improve the payment experience in bars.