Read Between the Wines Podcast

In 1910, a farmer from Abruzzo travelled to Naples to see an ear specialist and came home with twenty hectares and a fifteenth century lookout tower, bought from Baron Zambra in instalments, with no guarantee. More than a century later, Gambero Rosso's Vini d'Italia 2026 named the family winery, bottling since 1961, its Emerging Winery.
For episode 105 of Read Between the Wines, Pierre Ferland sits down with Federico De Cerchio, CEO of Famiglia De Cerchio and fourth generation behind Torre Zambra, in Villamagna, Abruzzo, Italy, to find out how a winery founded in 1961 becomes an emerging one.
Federico did not drink wine until his early twenties and preferred motorbikes to Montepulciano. He built an online wine business in Rome, sold it in 2018 and came home to change the family estate: shorter ageing, tonneaux in place of barriques, and a fresher, more drinkable Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, while the concrete vats his grandfather Laurentino used in 1961 stay untouched. Today, 95% of the wine is sold outside Italy, and the tower destroyed during the Second World War stands again as the Torre Zambra Resort.
We talk about Villamagna DOC, a tiny appellation created in 2011 in a town of 2,000 people with seven wineries, why Federico believes terroir includes the people who work it, and why the wine industry needs to listen more to the people who drink wine. We also settle the eternal confusion between Montepulciano the grape and Montepulciano the Tuscan town.
A bonus episode, available exclusively on our website, goes further into certification, the brutal 2023 season and where the wine industry is heading.
 
Featuring: Torre Zambra, Famiglia De Cerchio, Federico De Cerchio, Villamagna DOC, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Abruzzo, Italy, Gambero Rosso, organic wine, Italian wine.

A valley once dismissed as too dry and too stony for anything worth drinking, now home to some of the most decorated wine in New Zealand, named after an actual spy base down the road, on purpose.
For episode 104 of Read Between the Wines, Pierre Ferland sits down with Amanda Johnson, Managing Director of Spy Valley, to find out what happens when a family vineyard built on land everyone else had written off decides its branding should be just as bold as its wine.
Amanda is the second generation steward of Spy Valley, in Marlborough, New Zealand. Her father planted vines on ground considered too infertile for grapes, and Amanda later pitched the winery's name herself, pairing the GCSB listening post next door with her father's lifelong James Bond fandom. The result is a winery with decommissioned radar domes on its lawn, Morse code on its labels, and a trophy case that takes the joke far less seriously than the wine inside it.
We talk about how Marlborough became the region that Sauvignon Blanc built, why Pinot Noir may be its best kept secret, and how Chief Winemaker Emily Gaspard-Clark, New Zealand's Young Winemaker of the Year in 2019, is carrying the estate forward since Wendy Stuckey's retirement. We also get into the pressures facing the wider Marlborough industry, from pricing competition abroad to a very local warning about what happens when a region puts too many grapes in one basket.
A bonus episode, available exclusively on our website, goes further into the Pinot Noir question every producer dreads, and the spy theme nobody at Spy Valley is willing to drop.
 
Featuring: Spy Valley, Amanda Johnson, Marlborough, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Gewürztraminer, Emily Gaspard-Clark, Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand, New Zealand wine, Appellation Marlborough Wine.

In 1980, a Swiss couple on a Christmas visit to Tuscany noticed one hillside in Chianti sitting in full sun while the whole valley around it disappeared into fog. They bought that hill the following year. They liked the light, nothing more.
In this episode of Read Between the Wines, Pierre Ferland sits down with Barbara Widmer, Winemaker and CEO of Brancaia, in Castellina in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy, to ask what it means to inherit a vision and decide what to protect and what to tear up.
Barbara was studying architecture in Zurich when the 1994 harvest pulled her back to her parents' estate. She went on to study oenology, and her thesis on a newly acquired coastal property in Maremma started a one label strategy now stretched across three estates with distinct characters: Castellina, Radda in Chianti and Maremma. Where other Tuscan families split their holdings into separate brands, Brancaia chose the opposite path.
We talk about Il Blu, the wine so far outside Chianti Classico's own rules it had to be sold as a table wine and became one of the first Super Tuscans. We talk about how a wine earns its name at Brancaia, the shift to controlled fermentation as harvests grow warmer, and replanting with massal selection instead of nursery clones. And we end on a harder question: does wine, does Tuscany, still have something worth protecting.
A short bonus episode on sustainability and climate change at Brancaia is available exclusively on our website.
 
Featuring: Brancaia, Barbara Widmer, Il Blu, Chianti Classico, Castellina in Chianti, Radda in Chianti, Maremma Toscana, Super Tuscan, organic farming, sustainability, Tuscany, Italy.

What does it take to fix a problem an entire industry had quietly decided was unfixable?
Greg Lambrecht, inventor, founder, and chairman of Coravin, joins Pierre Ferland for a conversation that starts in a wine shop at sixteen and ends up rewriting how the world drinks by the glass. An MIT-trained engineer who spent his career designing chemotherapy needles and spinal implants, Lambrecht looked at the oldest rule in wine — open it, and the clock starts — and treated it like a design flaw instead of a tradition.
We go deep into the early prototypes tested on friends, including a neurosurgeon who tried to pay him in wine, the decision to step back as CEO once he realized he was a medical device guy, not a consumer products guy, and the eight years it took to crack Coravin Sparkling after a Guardian critic's one blunt question wrecked his London launch. We talk about walking into hostile Bordeaux chateaux where producers threatened to break his needle, the retailer who changed everything in one Paris sidewalk demo, and Veronique Sanders, the Bordeaux producer who opened the door Coravin needed. We also get into the QVC lesson that reshaped how Coravin sells, his dream of great wine sold by the glass at retail, and the newly launched Coravin Guide, now live in Madrid, New York, and Miami.
Greg put it best: "Our biggest competitor is that sentence, I finished the bottle."
This one comes with a bonus. We asked Greg the question we couldn't let go of: ten years from now, is this still a Coravin device — or has it become a platform, a media brand, a whole new category? His answer, plus his real philosophy on leadership, ego, and why the Coravin Guide spends its spotlight on everyone but Coravin, is in an exclusive bonus episode, available only at readbetweenthewines.com. It doesn't stream anywhere else — this one's for the website only.


Featuring: Coravin, Greg Lambrecht, wine preservation technology, wine by the glass, Coravin Guide, Timeless, Pivot, Sparkling, Bordeaux, Veronique Sanders, QVC, wine industry innovation, medical device invention, wine storytelling.

Why does a 155-year-old empire keep reinventing itself — when coasting was always an option?
Mireia Torres Maczassek, Director of Knowledge and Innovation at Familia Torres, joins Pierre Ferland for a conversation recorded live in Montreal at a Primum Familiae Vini gathering — and it is exactly as good as that setting sounds. Fifth generation of one of the most recognised wine dynasties on the planet, chemical engineer turned oenologist, director of both Torres Priorat and Bodegas Jean Leon, and the scientist quietly running one of the most ambitious research programmes in the history of wine.
We go deep into the 40-year project to recover pre-phylloxera Catalan grape varieties — found in forests, climbing trees, surviving near creek beds — and what it means to give a lost vine a name. We talk about the Torres & Earth climate programme, regenerative viticulture at scale across more than 1,100 organic hectares, and the very honest question of whether doing enough and feeling like you are doing enough are actually the same thing. We discuss Mas La Plana, Grans Muralles, the Waltraud Riesling — a love letter planted at 500 metres in the Penèdes mountains — and the brandy that almost nobody talks about despite nearly a century of production. And we travel to Chile, where the family has been making wine since 1979 and where the ancestral varieties project takes on an entirely different cultural weight.
Mireia put it best: we are going backwards in the sense that we are recovering what was lost. But we are going forward, because we have to find what survives.
Featuring: Familia Torres, Mireia Torres Maczassek, Spanish wine, Penèdes, Priorat, Catalonia, ancestral grape varieties, regenerative viticulture, Mas La Plana, Grans Muralles, Waltraud Riesling, Jaime I brandy, Torres Chile, Primum Familiae Vini, fine wine, terroir.