The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Guest: Samantha McClure — Head of Marketing and AI Innovations, Meridian Advisory Partners

• Meridian is a boutique digital marketing agency serving wineries, nonprofits, and midsize direct-to-consumer companies
• The agency is roughly six months old, though the founders had been consulting for wineries for years at other agencies first
• Samantha has been in marketing over 15 years, most recently at Chrometrix, a digital agency running testing and experimentation for Fortune 100 enterprise clients
• On being the smartest person in the room: she'd rather not be — that's how she keeps learning
• What clients actually get: consumer testing, lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, conversion testing, and recovering abandoned carts — everything from the ad to the checkout
• Meridian was born out of consultants who kept calling each other for coworking sessions and strategy talks, then decided to combine into one firm
• The agency is female-founded by design — the founders wanted to bring a group of highly intelligent women together deliberately
• Samantha on the stereotype: women can be incredibly logical, strategic, and tactical — she calls it the opposite of the usual narrative

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Victoria opens with her own name, because hosts tend to tiptoe around it — P-E-L-L-E-T-I-E-R — and from there the story moves fast. She was an only child, gifted, and a bit of a loner who genuinely liked the solitude. Her bike was the vehicle for all of it: new parks, new kids, streetlights as the only curfew, and the habit that never left her — watching people and inventing stories about them. She got her first real job at eleven at a hair salon, running the front desk, the cash, the appointments, the sweeping, the towels. She was already five foot eight and passed easily for older. Babysitting on the side paid two dollars an hour.

At fourteen she became assistant manager at a shoe store, coaching people decades older than she was. She describes herself as turtle shell outside, marshmallow inside — somewhere between don't mess with me and do you want a hug — but she's clear that the shell came later, built out of a belief that leadership meant all business, all the time, mask on, emotions off. She unlearned that. Vulnerability and empathy, she says, are what actually build trust.

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Karen Green has sat on both sides of the buying desk. She started as a retail buyer at Tesco, moved to Boots buying vitamins and supplements, then crossed the table to sell food and drink herself — before a move to the south of France inspired her to pour all of that knowledge into a consultancy and a book. The book is called Buyerology, and the name arrived, as the best ideas do, unexpectedly: on a bus in Reading, when a furniture store called Sofology rolled past the window and lit the spark.

In part one of our conversation, Karen breaks down the nuts and bolts of studying the buyer — why understanding how someone buys is the difference between a clear selling message and fumbling around in the dark, and why mass marketing is a losing game for everyone who isn't Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Then she names the mistake she sees constantly, including in wine: founders who build products for themselves and call it a target market, and winemakers who perfect the grape without ever asking who's going to buy the bottle. Her test is disarmingly simple. When a client describes their ideal customer and it sounds suspiciously like the person talking, she tells them exactly what she's thinking: "So that's you." The full pour, no fluff.

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Jeanine Lum never planned to invent anything. She'd been a W2 employee her whole career, spent twenty years in law enforcement, flew part time as a flight attendant for a decade, and had no manufacturing background whatsoever. What she had instead was a series of ruined bottles. One was left behind in a dark car in Paso Robles and pushed its own cork out overnight from heat that wasn't even extreme — she notes that wine starts to suffer around seventy-five degrees, a temperature most people would call comfortable. Another was a cardboard box holding about $1,400 worth of wine that tipped over on a winding road. She went shopping for a fix, spent anywhere from fifty to two thousand dollars a bag, and discovered that every product on the market carried wine without protecting it. The idea that finally worked came from a box of chocolates a friend sent her with an ice pack inside: take the cardboard grid that wine ships in and turn it into a frozen, interlocking chamber

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Forrest closes the series with a true-or-false round, and the fun of it is watching how fast Victoria sorts fact from invention. The executive role at twenty-four is real. The sommelier training in Bordeaux is pure fiction — she went straight into corporate leadership and never detoured. The Turnaround Queen nickname is real too, and when Forrest asks whether that's runway or corporate, she gives the answer nobody expects: corporate, absolutely, though she did walk a runway as a teenager.

The turnaround stories are where the episode gets its weight. One came through a consulting engagement with a global organization badly damaged by COVID, whose board mandated thirty percent of the workforce or operating expenses out of the business. She worked directly with the CEO and the board to engineer it. The other is the reason she ended up living in the United States — a company emerging from a dissolved joint venture that rebranded, went public, and then acquired six companies in eighteen months. Compressed, brutal, and exactly the kind of thing she keeps getting called in to do.

Then Forrest asks about the TEDx talk, and the tone shifts. She was the opening speaker in Miami on a night themed around resilience, and her definition is more demanding than the usual one. Healthy resilience isn't gritting your teeth and armoring up — she's explicit that a shield of protective armor is not the thing. It's finding a way to process challenge and adversity rather than simply withstand it, and she built a five-step process for doing exactly that. Anyone who heard her story in Part 1 will understand where the framework came from.

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Victoria planned the whole Napa and Sonoma trip herself, and she planned it strategically — mostly wineries she and Danny already knew and loved, which she cheerfully admits made the buying decisions easy. It had been fifteen years since her last visit, and it was his first time in wine country at all.

The surprises came from the edges of her palate. She's a Sauvignon Blanc and Sancerre person who leans into bold Cabernet, and yet she found herself trying Viognier for the first time and tasting Chardonnays she'd normally skip entirely. Some of it she loved immediately. Some of it she suspects she'll grow into.

One stop was purely sentimental: the winery whose wine she and Danny served at their wedding. They went back. Their tastes have changed, they don't love it the way they once did, and she says so without any hand-wringing about it.

The tasting room she declined to buy from is the more interesting story. The wine was good. The experience felt stale to her, and that was enough. She's an experience person — the same instinct that governs how she picks restaurants, and the same instinct that put her husband in a mud bath in Calistoga so they'd have a story worth telling later.

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For the finale, Forrest flips the format and puts four multiple-choice questions to Jeanine about the product she spent years building. She handles the first one easily — heat is the enemy, though she notes for the record that she'd prefer to worry about curious seagulls.

The quiz opens into the best running conversation of the series, about zippers. Jeanine has strong feelings here, having wrestled with a two-zip cooler that she says takes an act of God to close, and she wants to know whether there's a balance between waterproof and usable. Her own bag runs tight, she admits, which is why it ships with zipper lube — a term Forrest has never heard in his life. She explains the application, then confesses she's only used it once herself. Her husband is the one who bothers. She just muscles it. Forrest catches the shot fired and asks his name, and that's how Jeff ends up mentioned on the podcast.

The last question is about freezer discipline, and the answer is all of the above, which leads Jeanine to explain why skipping a pack to make room defeats the purpose — the modular pieces can be repositioned along the bag wall instead of removed, so you keep the full chill while making space for larger bottles or food.

Then comes the moment worth staying for. Asked who's been her biggest supporter, Jeanine names her husband, who's watched her stay up half the night with manufacturers. But her biggest critic was her middle daughter, who'd heard years of "I'm going to invent that" and called the ideas silly. When she finally saw this one, she stopped — and thought of every bachelorette party she'd hauled champagne to in a cardboard box. She closes with discount codes for listeners and where to find 3rd Bottle online.

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This is the practical episode. Jeanine walks through what you'll find at 3rdbottle.com: two bags, a six-pack and a twelve-pack, each with the interlocking modular ice packs that lie flat in a freezer. The six-pack holds six to eight hours depending on how well you keep it sealed. You can also buy the ice packs on their own if you already own a cooler tall enough to take a wine bottle — the measurements are posted on the site — though she's careful to say she can't promise chill times in a cooler she didn't design. Every bag ships with the ice packs and a condensation towel, the latter existing purely because the packs sweat a little and she didn't like the small pool of water at the bottom, so she had one made to absorb it.

Then Forrest asks the question that opens up the best part of the episode: why fill them with water instead of using the pre-filled gel packs everyone else uses? The answer turns out to have four separate layers. Cost and customs came first — chemical fills are treated differently at the border and would have driven the price up. Performance came second, and this is the part that surprised her: she prototyped with gels, even pulled the beads out of a commercial gel pack and tested them in her own design, and found that plain water chilled just as long. Liability came third. She didn't want to be responsible for a child getting into a broken pack.

The fourth reason is the one nobody would predict. She designed the whole system to clear TSA, because she flies to Europe, buys wine, and brings it home in cargo — and she didn't want to stand at a checkpoint answering questions about hazardous chemicals. When Forrest compliments the foresight, she gives it up easily: she used to be a flight attendant, and she heard those speeches every single day.

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Victoria wrote a book about building a personal brand, and then people kept asking her the same follow-up question: fine, I built it — now what? That question became the sequel. Influence Unleashed taught the construction. Influence Activated teaches what you do once it's standing. Her diagnosis of where most people go wrong is uncomfortable and probably correct: they lead with credentials and industry and job titles, when the truth is people do business with people.

She never takes a meeting cold. Prospective hire, new client, old client — she looks them up first, and she assumes they're doing the same to her. That's the whole argument in a sentence. Write your own narrative or accept the one strangers assemble for you. She's honest about using AI, honest about the filters, and firm that none of it works without something real underneath. And she has little patience for the quiet hope so many professionals live on: that doing excellent work will simply be noticed.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
- The inspiration behind the name CLINQ ZERO
- Anto's previous corporate experience
- How CLINQ ZERO differs from traditional wines
- The business model of non-alcoholic wine
- Future plans for CLINQ ZERO varieties

TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00] Welcome and Introduction
[00:06] Overview of CLINQ ZERO and Anto's Background
[00:30] Round 1: The Making of CLINQ ZERO Begins
[04:00] Round 2: The Business of CLINQ ZERO Starts
[06:12] Closing Remarks and Where to Find CLINQ ZERO

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