The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

In 1978, Robert Parker launched a free wine newsletter out of Baltimore with no industry connections and no advertising, building his reputation on a simple 50-to-100 point scoring scale borrowed from the American school grading system. That simple idea ended up reshaping how the entire world drinks wine, giving one man's palate enough influence to swing a bottle's price by millions and turn a 100-point score into an instant trophy...

Chef Chuck Hayworth of RealMedicalMeals.com doesn't just cook — he heals. In Part 2 of this conversation, Chef Chuck pulls back the curtain on two upcoming books: the C5 Longevity Cuisine Cookbook and a Hidden Vegetable Cookbook designed to quietly restore nutrition to the American diet. Can't afford personalized medical nutrition services? He's writing these books for you.

Chef Chuck also walks through his personal go-to mea...

What would it take to completely relearn how to taste food and wine? For Chef Chuck Hayworth — the Thankfully Local private chef and resort chef based in North Carolina — the answer was a rare stomach cancer diagnosis that changed everything 26 years ago.

In Part 1 of this conversation, Forrest and Chef Chuck dig into the origin story: how a chef already 35 years into kitchen life had to go back to basics — sweet,...

The front label said Robert Mondavi, the man who put Napa Valley on the map. The back label said a fistfight over a mink coat, a decade of lawsuits, and two brothers who didn't speak for years. In 1965, Robert and Peter Mondavi came to blows at Charles Krug Winery, the family business their father Cesare had bought in 1943. The fallout sent Robert into a six-month leave and eventually out of the company entirely — but instead...

Ten questions, two rounds, and a whole lot of uncomfortable truths about why you pay what you pay. Rusty Cellars hosts this Pop the Quiz episode pulled from Claire Wang's appearance on the show, covering everything from MRI brain scans proving price changes the actual experience of taste, to why a $5 wine beat a $45 wine in blind taste tests, to the single sentence a Chateau Pichon Baron director used to explain his entire pricing ...

What does a pricing strategist know about wine? More than you'd think. Claire Wang joins Forrest Kelly to break down the psychology behind why we pay what we pay — and why our brains are doing a lot more work than we realize every time we reach for a bottle.

Claire unpacks the famous Stanford and Caltech MRI study that proved people's brains literally experience more pleasure when they think they're drinking expensive wine &m...

The front label said Award of Excellence. The back label said $250 and a voicemail box. In 2008, writer and researcher Robin Goldstein invented a restaurant from scratch — complete with a website, a Milan phone number, and a reserve wine list built almost entirely from Wine Spectator's own lowest-rated Italian wines — to test how seriously the magazine vetted its restaurant wine award. The fictional Osteria L'Intrepido ...

Guest: Claire Wang, an international pricing expert

 Book: The Price of Influence — available September 

Topics covered:

• Charm pricing: why $9.99 outsells $10.00
• The Stanford experiment proving price changes how wine tastes
• Anchoring effect: seeing a high price first makes the next one feel like a deal
• Why "limited time" scarcity is mostly psychological
• Free shipping vs. price cuts — which moves prod...

Guest: Claire Wang (Pricing Strategist) 

Upcoming Book: The Price of Influence — September

Topics covered:

• The Stanford/Caltech MRI wine experiment — identical wines, different price tags, measurably different brain activity
• The "marketing placebo effect" — believing you paid more makes you genuinely enjoy more
• Journal of Wine Economics blind tasting study: untrained drinkers preferred cheaper wine wi...

What does a bullfrog have to do with Barolo? More than you'd think.

In this Wine Wednesday Back Label Story, Forrest Kelly uncorks the surprisingly rich wine philosophy hidden inside Hoyt Axton's 1971 classic — the song Three Dog Night rode to six weeks at number one. The line that stuck? "He always had some mighty fine wine." No credentials required. No auction catalog. Just the stubborn, booming joy of a bottle that moves y...

Claire Wang was in Bordeaux for a business trip when she visited Château Pichon Baron, part of the AXA Millésimes portfolio — one of the world's largest insurance companies, which also happens to own a remarkable collection of wineries across Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Portugal. She sat down with managing director Christian Seely and asked him point blank: how do you price your wine?

His answer stopped her cold.

"I will charge t...

Ever wonder why a $18.99 bottle feels like a deal but $19 feels like a splurge? 

There's a reason for that — and it's not an accident. Claire Wang is a pricing strategist with two decades of experience helping major brands put the right number on everything from phone plans to foreign exchange rates. She's also the author of an upcoming book, The Price of Influence: How to Move Anyone to a Yes.

In Part 1, Claire breaks d...

Quiz master Rusty Cellars is back, and this time he's turning everything you heard in the Sherman Mohr interview into a full-on game show. Two rounds, five questions each — a warm-up round that eases you in, and a second round with a little more bite.

Topics covered include how Shared Spirits actually works (hint: no app store download required), how the COVID-19 pivot shaped the business, what happens to a drink credit when ...

Episode Summary In this episode, host Forest Kelly is joined by Paul Cullen, former bass player for Bad Company, and Sofia Hedman, Group Travel Manager at Accent on Travel. They share the details of an upcoming, exclusive luxury wine cruise aboard the Oceania Allura, sailing from Rome to Venice in April 2027. Learn about the private performances, curated vineyard tours on Mount Etna, and a special pre-cruise culinary experience in ...

Sherman Mohr is co-founder and COO of Shared Spirits, and Over50Pros. 

In this episode Sherman cover how wine brands fight for placement at restaurants and retail stores, how Shared Spirits works as a mobile platform for buying, sharing and redeeming drinks at restaurant partners, how Sherman's promo agency grew to 1,700 events a year doing retail wine and spirits sampling activations, the surprising reality that the average a...

Ernest and Julio Gallo founded E. & J. Gallo Winery in Modesto, California in the fall of 1933, just after the repeal of Prohibition. Their starting capital was less than $6,000 — $5,000 of it borrowed from Ernest's mother-in-law, Teresa Franzia. Their winemaking education came from pre-Prohibition pamphlets retrieved from the basement of the Modesto Public Library. With a single tractor running back-to-back 12-hour shift...

Hosted by Rusty Sellers, producer of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast and resident quizmaster of the Pop The Quiz segment

Flying Whale Edition — ten questions based on the Maba Ba interview series

 Round One: Multiple Choice (5 questions)

• Which African tribe inspired Flying Whale Wine? (Dogon)
• Which star system did the Dogon base their belief system on? (Sirius)
• Where did Maba Ba grow up? (Dakar, Senegal)
• What une...

Sherman Mohr has spent years placing brand ambassadors for spirits and wine companies — and the data kept pointing to the same thing: the best ones were over 50. That pattern sparked a new venture called Over 50 Pros (over50pros.com), a platform dedicated to helping people in that demographic understand that their experience has real market value — they just need a new narrative for delivering it.

Sherman notes that rou...

David Lett didn't discover the Willamette Valley — he invented it as wine country. When he arrived in 1965, Oregon was timber and berries. Nobody was planting Pinot Noir there. Nobody serious, anyway. Lett and his wife Diana set up in the Dundee Hills and did it anyway, with no roadmap, no guarantee, and no backup plan.

For years they were written off. The market wasn't interested in Oregon wine. If it wasn't French or Califo...