Read Between the Wines Podcast

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.

In 2001, a bottle of Clos des Épeneaux 1996 landed on our podcast host's table and changed the course of his wine life forever. It didn't simply introduce him to Burgundy; it changed the way he understood wine, place, patience, and beauty. The man who made it had no idea. While that bottle was beginning its journey around the world, Pascal Marchand was in Burgundy, celebrating the birth of his second son. That bottle and the story behind it, is where Episode 100 of Read Between the Wines begins.
Pascal arrived in Burgundy in 1983 as a young merchant marine from Montreal with no vineyard, no family name, and no wine pedigree. Two years later, at just 22 years old, he became only the second non-Frenchman ever appointed to lead a Burgundian estate, taking the reins at Domaine Comte Armand and its legendary Clos des Épeneaux. Over the next fifteen vintages, he helped shape one of Burgundy's most iconic wines. One of them changed our host's life.
In this special centennial episode, Pascal and host Pierre Ferland travel through four decades of Burgundy: the generation of young vignerons who reshaped the region together, the lessons he learned from Henri Jayer, why he embraced biodynamics long before it became fashionable, and why terroir still matters more than technique. In their intimate conversation, they explore the personalities of Chambertin and Mazis-Chambertin, the quiet brilliance of Burgundy's centuries-old classification system, the realities of climate change, and the challenge of preserving identity in a world where harvests arrive a month earlier than they once did.
But this conversation reaches far beyond Burgundy. They talk about prestige and speculation, about whether great wine is becoming a luxury asset instead of something meant to be shared, and about what happens when younger generations drink differently than those before them. Pascal's answers are thoughtful, deeply human, and ultimately hopeful. His reflections on pleasure, generosity, and the role wine plays in our lives may be the most important part of the entire conversation.
Episode 100 was always going to be personal. For our podcast host, it was always going to be Burgundy.

Featuring: Pascal Marchand, Maison Marchand-Tawse, Clos des Épeneaux, Domaine Comte Armand, Gevrey-Chambertin, Chambertin Grand Cru, Mazis-Chambertin, Pinot Noir, Côte de Beaune, Côte de Nuits, Moray Tawse.

Sixty years before "drink less, but better" became an industry mantra, one man in Tuscany was already living it. His grandson has spent his whole career proving him right.
In this episode, Pierre sits down with Giovanni Folonari, of Ambrogio e Giovanni Folonari Tenute, the family behind four distinct Tuscan estates built on a single conviction: that quality can't be rented, it has to be owned.
The conversation moves through Nozzole, the Chianti Classico estate where clay soil and history run deep; Tenute del Cabreo, the Supertuscan project that dared to plant Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay and even Pinot Noir on Sangiovese ground; Campo al Mare, the family's late but decisive bet on Bolgheri; and Tenuta La Fuga, the smallest estate in the portfolio and home to a Brunello Riserva named for two sisters. Along the way, Giovanni talks candidly about the family decision to walk away from an easier, more recognisable business, what it actually takes to grow Pinot Noir outside Burgundy, and why hospitality became part of the estate's identity long before the rest of the wine world caught on.
Want more? A bonus episode, going deeper into the family's history, the technical side of the cellar, and a side of Giovanni that has nothing to do with wine at all, is available exclusively at readbetweenthewines.com.

Featuring: Chianti Classico, Supertuscan, Bolgheri, Brunello di Montalcino, Tuscany, Sangiovese, family winery, Italian fine wine, terroir, wine and hospitality.

In 1985, Ferruccio Ferragamo went looking for game in the hills between Florence and Arezzo. He came home having found a thousand-year-old medieval village instead.
Years later, his son Salvatore rode a bicycle into those same hills and saw something his father hadn't: a valley whose soil told an entirely different story in every direction, sandstone in one corner, clay rich with sea fossils in another, the memory of an ocean that vanished millions of years before anyone planted a vine.
This is the story of Il Borro — a family better known for shoes than soil, who spent three decades turning a ruin into one of Tuscany's most decorated organic estates, and who are now writing a second chapter in Montalcino.
Salvatore Ferragamo, Vice President of Il Borro, sits down with Pierre Ferland to talk about the Valdarno di Sopra, an appellation the estate helped bring back from obscurity, the single vineyard behind Alessandro dal Borro, named for a Medici military commander built on an unusually large scale, the horses that plough Nitrito instead of tractors, and Petruna, a return to ancient amphora winemaking that strips Sangiovese back to something almost nothing else in Tuscany attempts.
And at the very end, Salvatore says something about Pinino, the family's newer estate in Montalcino, that he didn't have to admit. But did anyway.
The bonus episode, where Salvatore goes into the years before certification, the business case behind the vineyard's solar fields, and what actually earns a second bottle of wine, is available exclusively at readbetweenthewines.com.
 
Featuring: Il Borro, Valdarno di Sopra DOC, Tuscany, Italy, Sangiovese, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Chardonnay, Pinino, Montalcino, Brunello di Montalcino.