The Daily Decant
The Daily Decant delivers practical wine knowledge in five minutes a day to help you choose, order, and talk about wine with more confidence in everyday social settings. Each episode offers concise insights on regions, varietals, and standout bottles you can use the next time you're at dinner, hosting friends, or picking out a bottle.
Episodes
181 episodes
The Indigenous Grapes Nobody Knows: Greece's Hidden Variety
Greece has over 300 indigenous grape varieties, and most international wine drinkers know two of them. Today's episode covers the five Greek grapes worth knowing beyond Assyrtiko and Xinomavro: Moschofilero, the intensely floral pink-skinned wh...
Xinomavro: The Red Grape That Changes Everything
Xinomavro is the red grape of northern Greece that serious wine writers have compared to Nebbiolo, producing wines of extraordinary structure, acidity, and longevity from the mountain appellations of Naoussa and Amyndeon. Today's episode covers...
Santorini & Assyrtiko: Volcanic Wine Unlike Anything Else
Santorini's vineyards are unlike any other on earth: ancient, ungrafted vines coiled into basket shapes low to the volcanic ground, surviving winds and drought that would defeat any conventional trellising system. The wine they produce — Assyrt...
Special Guest - Jaime Gillespie with Somm.ish
I sat down with Jaime Gillespie, the creator behind the popular wine tips and travel platform Somm.ish, for a wide-ranging conversation about where wine culture is headed, the destinations that are reshaping how she thinks about wine, and the j...
Fortified Wine Week Wrap Up
Six episodes, four major wine categories, and one central argument: fortified wines are not old-fashioned, not just for special occasions, and not adequately recognized for the complexity and craftsmanship they represent. Sunday's wrap-up bring...
How to Buy, Serve & Store Fortified Wine
One of the most common barriers to buying fortified wine is not knowing what to do with the rest of the bottle after opening. Saturday's practical episode removes that barrier and all others: how long each fortified wine style keeps after openi...
Vermouth, Marsala & the Forgotten Fortifieds
Beyond Port, Sherry, and Madeira lies a broader world of fortified wines that most wine drinkers either don't know exist or know only in the wrong context. Today's episode covers vermouth as a serious, complex fortified wine worthy of drinking ...
Madeira: The Wine That Cannot Die
Madeira is the most unusual wine in the world, a fortified wine from a Portuguese volcanic island in the Atlantic that improves rather than deteriorates when exposed to heat, oxygen, and time, producing bottles from the 18th and 19th centuries ...
Sherry: The Most Misunderstood Wine in the World
Sherry is the most stylistically diverse wine in the world: from bone-dry, pale, saline Fino through the nutty complexity of Amontillado and Oloroso to the syrupy sweetness of Pedro Ximénez. Today's episode covers the complete Sherry spectrum, ...
Port: The Douro Valley and Its Extraordinary Wines
Port is made in one of the world's most dramatic wine regions, from a blend of indigenous Portuguese varieties, through a process of arrested fermentation that creates the characteristic sweetness before years of aging in the lodges of Vila Nov...
What Is a Fortified Wine, And Why Does It Exist?
Fortified wine wasn't invented for complexity or pleasure, it was invented for survival, as a practical solution to the problem of wine spoiling on long sea voyages. Today's episode covers the science of fortification, the historical context th...
WSET Level 1 Week Wrap Up
Six episodes, one week, one honest account of what it feels like to take a formal wine exam after 160-plus episodes of wine podcasting. Sunday's wrap-up brings WSET Level 1 Week together with the full recap, my honest verdict on the qualificati...
The Wine Student's Practical Guide: How to Keep Learning
A wine qualification provides a framework. What fills that framework is a set of specific, sustained habits that the course itself doesn't have time to build. Saturday's episode covers the practical tools that make the most difference after for...
What WSET Doesn't Teach You, And What Comes Next
WSET Level 1 is a genuinely valuable qualification with real limits. Today's episode covers what the curriculum doesn't address: vintage variation, producer reputation, natural wine, the economics of wine: explains the full WSET pathway from Le...
Storing, Serving & Pairing: The WSET Fundamentals
The WSET Level 1 section on storing, serving, and pairing wine is the most immediately practical part of the curriculum, and the part I was most dismissive of going in. Today's episode covers the specific serving temperature ranges for differen...
Tasting Like an Examiner: The WSET Systematic Approach
The WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting, the SAT, is the formal tasting methodology that WSET uses across all its qualification levels. Today's episode covers the full SAT: appearance, nose, palate, and conclusions, with every sub-category expl...
The Wines of the World: How WSET Organizes Wine Knowledge
WSET Level 1's most lasting contribution is not any individual fact about a grape or region, it's the geographic and stylistic framework it provides for organizing wine knowledge. Today's episode covers how the WSET Level 1 curriculum maps the ...
I Took the WSET Level 1. Here's What Happened.
Last week, after 160-plus episodes of The Daily Decant, Lauren sat the WSET Level 1 Award in Wines, the entry-level qualification from the world's most widely recognized wine education body. Today's episode tells the personal story: why I decid...
Tuscany Wrap-Up: Italy's Most Ambitious Region
Six episodes, three thousand years of history, one grape, and a region that has managed to be simultaneously the most traditional and the most rebellious wine culture in Italy. Sunday's wrap-up brings Tuscany Week together with the full recap, ...
How to Buy Tuscan Wine Without Overpaying
Tuscany's price range is enormous — from fifteen-dollar Morellino to three-hundred-dollar Brunello Riserva — and buying intelligently requires knowing the DOCG hierarchy, the vintages worth prioritizing, and the specific producers to trust at e...
Beyond the Famous Names: The Rest of Tuscany
Tuscany's wine identity is almost entirely defined by three zones — Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino, and the Super Tuscan Bolgheri coast. But Tuscany has a dozen wine zones of real quality, most offering better value than the famous na...
The Super Tuscans Revisited: The Rebellion That Changed Italian Wine
We touched on the Super Tuscan story during Cabernet week. Today we go much deeper — covering the full arc from Sassicaia's accidental origins in the 1940s through the Antinori family's deliberate creation of Tignanello in 1971, the establishme...
Brunello di Montalcino: Italy's Most Age-Worthy Wine
Brunello di Montalcino was essentially invented by a single family in the 1880s, spent a century in relative obscurity, and is now recognized as one of the greatest and most age-worthy red wines produced anywhere on earth. Today's episode tells...
Chianti Classico: Sangiovese in Its Heartland
Chianti's reputation spent most of the twentieth century in the gutter, associated with cheap wine in straw-covered bottles made for volume rather than quality. The recovery of Chianti Classico, the historic heartland zone between Florence and ...
Why Tuscany: Italy's Most Ambitious Region
Tuscany has appeared throughout this show's run as a supporting character: in Cabernet week, Merlot week, the Everyday Drinker. This week it gets its own full treatment. Today's episode covers the three thousand years of Tuscan wine history, th...