She had good reason to be distracted. Sara arrives listing off everything new in her life — a new album, a new baby, a new house, a new tour, and a new shirt, the last of which turns out to be the only one she's willing to discuss at length. There's a running joke about her age that she refuses to concede, a stretch where she takes over the broadcast entirely to plug her own record, and a genuinely strange detour into reading the temperature, the humidity, and the dew point off the studio screen, at which point she asks the question every radio person has privately wondered about their own weather reports.

Forrest had interviewed her once before, a few years earlier, right around the time "Born to Fly" was arriving, and he spends this visit cheerfully collecting on that debt. Sara notices immediately. The result is two people trying to get a straight answer out of each other and failing on purpose, which is exactly what makes twenty-year-old vault tape worth keeping. This is Part 1.

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Most people who launch a non-alcoholic wine brand come at it from the wellness world, the beverage startup world, or the "I gave up drinking and couldn't find anything good" world. Anto Li Brizzi came at it from none of those places.

He came at it from the winery floor. As head of North America for an Italian capital equipment company, Anto spent years selling the machinery that wineries use to make wine. He understood the production process, the industry dynamics, and the category from the inside out. When he saw the opportunity to build a better non-alcoholic sparkling wine — one that starts as real wine and is gently dealcoholized rather than constructed from juice, sugar, and flavoring — he had the knowledge and the credibility to do it right.

In this first episode, Forrest traces Anto's full origin story:

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Justin Ennis explains that you can't talk about Napa Valley's red table wine history without talking about Joe Phelps, who founded Joseph Phelps Vineyards in 1973 after building a national construction company, Hensel Phelps, with his father's business out of Greeley, Colorado. Phelps released the first vintage of Insignia in 1974, Napa's first Bordeaux-style blend, and was also among the first to varietally label Syrah in California after Prohibition. Working alongside his first winemaker, German immigrant Walter Shug, Phelps experimented widely across varietals including Riesling, Johannesburg Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Syrah, tearing out plantings that didn't meet his standard and starting over until he found the quality he wanted. Justin connects this same relentless pursuit of excellence to the founding of Freestone Vineyards, born from Phelps' love of Burgundy wines and his desire to make a true Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in a cooler climate. That search led the Phelps team to the West Sonoma Coast, where they planted two estate vineyards, Pastoral at 60 acres and Quarter Moon at 40, totaling 100 acres roughly seven to eight miles from Bodega Bay and the Pacific Ocean, complete with a separate winemaking facility and staff dedicated entirely to the Freestone project.

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Rusty Cellars is back behind the quiz desk, and this time the subject is the one guest who literally wrote the book on wine talk. Maryse Chevriere — certified sommelier, illustrator, and James Beard Award winner for the gloriously funny @FreshCutGardenHose — gets the full Pop the Quiz treatment as Rusty turns her interview series into two rounds of trivia and translation.

Round one tests how closely you listened: her grape-stomping fall in Alsace, the humor award she won as an illustrator among writers, the Ian Cauble "fresh cut garden hose" line that named her brand, learning to drive at fifteen in Houston, and the all-Riesling wine list that gave her a big break in New York. Round two flips the glass and quizzes the language itself, busting the cork-sniffing ritual, decoding what legs really reveal, defending screw caps, and translating what "approachable" actually means when a sommelier says it with a smile.

It's the perfect capper to the Maryse series and a 5-minute crash course in sounding wine smart without a single ounce of snobbery. Tally your score, grab the book, and pour something friendly.

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Justin Ennis explains that his path into winemaking didn't run through a four-year degree program, but through 32 harvests of hands-on, ground-up learning that started at age 19 with the least glamorous jobs in the building: cleaning tanks, floors, drains, and barrels. From there, progression came step by step, learning to run the crush pad, organize the barrel room, and operate equipment like pumps, forklifts, and cranes before eventually taking on bigger responsibility. He stresses that interns benefit most from working at high-quality, technique-focused wineries rather than high-volume producers, since that's where the best habits get built. Justin describes winemaking as a true lifestyle career rather than a 9-to-5 job, comparing it to professional sports in terms of the all-in commitment it demands, since farming and winemaking run year-round with no real clocking out. He wraps up by walking through the cyclical rhythm of his year, from the relatively quiet stretch of leafing, shoot positioning, and crop estimating in the vineyard right now, to the upcoming July bottling and the harvest prep that follows, all while Mother Nature ultimately dictates the timeline.

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Henry Santos of Premium Blend joins Forrest to talk about Raise a Glass for Colombia, the company's earthquake relief campaign. Premium Blend has deep roots in the Colombian community, and just two months before the earthquake they launched Brisa Ardiente, a wine-based Colombian aguardiente created with the community's support. Now they're giving back in a big way. Henry explains that the campaign has grown beyond its original scope: rather than just Colombian restaurants, Premium Blend is challenging all of its customers to host a one-evening fundraising event and dedicate cocktail proceeds to earthquake victims. Premium Blend supplies the product to make those cocktails at no cost, and the company has opened its Miami warehouse as a receiving center for donations being gathered and shipped to Colombia. Henry also shares the good news that his friends and contacts in Colombia are safe, while acknowledging that not everyone was so fortunate. Restaurant and bar owners can get involved by visiting premiumblend.com or calling 800-899-0331 and asking for the Colombia package.

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Then things get playful: Keith cheerfully ad-libs an Outback Steakhouse tagline ("Crikey, I just threw that one in myself"), before a rapid-fire lightning round turns up Citizen Kane, a love of tattoos, chocolate over vanilla, and his dad as his athletic hero. He signs off by picking Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me — the same song that opens his show every night — ahead of the Farmhand benefit at the House of Blues in Anaheim. A warm, funny, generous farewell to a genuine star on the rise.

Show notes

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Justin Ennis dives into the long tradition of international exchange programs in winemaking, where interns and foreign workers move between wineries to share techniques, equipment innovations, and processes that have developed differently across regions. He recalls starting in the cellar at eighteen years old, working alongside people from completely different countries, languages, and backgrounds, and how that experience opened his eyes to how much more there was to learn beyond what he'd seen at home. Justin challenges the assumption that American winemaking is automatically the best, pointing out that Old World regions like France have been refining their craft for centuries longer. He explains why harvest season, typically August through October, requires an expanded labor pool and round-the-clock monitoring of fermentations as fruit comes in at all hours. He also talks about why internships matter so much for young people entering the industry, giving them a low-stakes way to explore winemaking, vineyard work, hospitality, or sales before committing to one path, and how he now gets to pass that same mentorship forward at his own winery.

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What does it take to build a 35-year-old spirits brand from scratch when nobody believes in your product, you have no industry experience, and a liquor license costs seven figures in your market? Ask Gino Santos.

Premium Blend Cocktails for one of the most wide-ranging, personal, and genuinely fascinating guest conversations in TB5MWP history.

The Business Concept Premium Blend produces wine-based spirits that are legally classified as wine — meaning any venue holding a basic beer and wine license (as low as $400 in Florida) can serve them. No six-figure liquor license required. The products are formulated to taste like the spirits they replicate: tequila, rum, vodka, mezcal, and more — and when mixed into cocktails, they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

The Product Line The flagship Agave Wine Collection is made from 100% blue agave sourced in Jalisco, Mexico — the same region as the world's finest tequilas — and includes Tequesta, Ginete (blanco-style), Guitarron, Guitarron Classico (reposado-style), Zapotec (mezcal-style), and El Guitarron Cristalino. At 48 proof, the line has evolved from a cocktail mixer into a sipping spirit in its own right. Additional products include Rumbero (rum-style), Clear Red (vodka-style), Santos Sangria (100% Spanish origin, grandmother's family recipe), Failing Irish Cream (produced in Ireland), and Cafe Luna coffee liqueur. A new Aguardiente (Colombian-style spirit) is also in the pipeline.

The Origin Story Gino and his brother Henry were born in Cuba. Their father Orestes — a celebrated Cuban singer-songwriter — was anti-Castro, thrown in jail, and eventually escaped with his family on a shrimp boat stolen by an uncle. The U.S. Coast Guard rescued them mid-ocean as the boat was sinking, bringing them ashore in Key West to sandwiches and cold milk. From Newark to Miami, through Stetson University and an MBA from the University of Miami, Gino ended up on the road selling Oscar Mayer products when he spotted a wine-based spirit that no one was marketing correctly. He and Henry saw the gap and built Premium Blend to fill it.

The Pitch and the Hustle The early years meant self-distribution across Florida in plastic bottles (glass breaks; plastic doesn't), cold-calling venues with no distributor support, and doing trade show samplings to get skeptical buyers to try the product. The sales pitch Gino still stands behind: Premium Blend increases your margins, improves customer retention, and makes your wait staff more money — all without a liquor license. Blind taste tests against actual rum and tequila have been closing deals ever since.

The Legacy Gino closes the series reflecting on his late father Orestes, who told his sons when they arrived in America: "We didn't come here to take, we came here to give." Premium Blend now employs a team, operates in multiple states, and has helped countless small restaurants stay in business on the strength of their cocktail margins alone.

📞 Premium Blend toll-free: 800-899-0331 🌐 premiumblend.com

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Justin Ennis, senior director of winemaking for Joseph Phelps Vineyards and the steward of its Freestone brand along the Sonoma Coast, where he's spent the last twenty years shaping the wines. Justin grew up surrounded by wine without ever planning to make a career of it — his grandfather kept a full table, and his mother's family in Healdsburg tended an old field-planted vineyard in the heart of the Russian River Valley. It wasn't until his stepfather, who worked facilities at what's now Hartford Family Winery, nudged him toward a harvest internship that everything changed. Justin signed on as cellar help for his first vintage in 1995 under winemaker Dan Goldfield, expecting little more than hard, unglamorous labor: power washing, barrel cleaning, and punch-downs. What he found instead reshaped his entire worldview. That first harvest, he worked alongside cellar hands from Portugal, France, and Australia, brought to the United States through agricultural exchange visa programs like CAEP. For a young guy from what he calls an "insular" Sonoma County, the camaraderie and global perspective of harvest work opened a door he hadn't known existed — one that would eventually take him as far as New Zealand using that same visa program. Justin reflects on falling into winemaking purely by chance, simply applying for a job that needed warm bodies, and discovering a calling he never set out to find.

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